The information age arrives for occ health
NIOSH launches timely database of injuries
If information is power, then employee health professionals are about to get a lot more powerful.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is launching the Occupational Health and Safety Network, a surveillance system that will help hospitals track and benchmark their injury rates against other similar hospitals across the country. It will include slips and trips, falls, workplace violence, patient handling injuries, other overexertion, and blood and body fluid exposures. NIOSH is currently seeking hospitals interested in helping test the system.
NIOSH's aim: "To take advantage of this electronic age and have almost real time electronic surveillance," says Ahmed Gomaa, MD, ScD, MSPH, medical officer in the Surveillance Branch of NIOSH's Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations & Field Studies in Cincinnati.
The surveillance system, which will be active in late 2012 or early 2013 and will be free of charge, also will highlight successful interventions that prevent injuries. "Once people start enrolling in the system, they will put their own solutions on the web. Beside the problem you can find the solution," he says.
The goal is to make surveillance simple and timely. NIOSH is working with vendors of occupational health software so it will be able to export the specific data collected by NIOSH. But if employee health professionals collect data with the specific categories and definitions, NIOSH can extract data from homegrown software systems or even from Excel spreadsheets, Gomaa says.
Key is a common language
"The key to participation is the common language, such as the event type, event location, and occupational category," says Sara Luckhaupt, MD, MPH, who is also medical officer in the Surveillance Branch. "No matter what kind of software system you use, we need everybody participating to use the same language."
Facilities will submit data monthly, and NIOSH will update the benchmarking data monthly. As the database of participants grows, it will be possible to look for benchmarks based on facility size, region or type large teaching hospitals or small community hospitals. The surveillance system will be open to acute care hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, outpatient dialysis centers, ambulatory surgery centers, outpatient clinics, and long-term care facilities.
The quality and timeliness of the data will far exceed what is currently available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, notes Gomaa. For example, BLS provides the most detailed information on injuries that involve days away from work or restricted work. Yet most injuries don't require time off, he says.
The BLS data does not really tell you "why people get injured, what to do about it and how to improve it," says Gomaa. That is the goal of the NIOSH project.
Meanwhile, the National Healthcare Safety Network, which is run by the Division of Healthcare Quality of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will continue to collect data on blood and body fluid exposures and influenza immunization of health care workers. (An updated protocol for HCW flu immunization surveillance will be implemented in August 2012.)
For more information on the Occupational Health and Safety Network or to become a testing facility, visit the website at www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/OHSN/ or email Ahmed Gomaa ([email protected]) or Sara Luckhaupt, ([email protected]).
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