The surveillance of occupational disease
and injury- 12 December 2005
A report released today by the
National Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee (NOHSAC) reports
that the systems used for the surveillance of occupational disease and
injury in New Zealand fall far short of internationally accepted practice,
especially for the surveillance of occupational disease.
Chair of the Committee, Professor
Neil Pearce from Massey University’s Centre for Public Health Research
says that “it is unacceptable that the various agencies responsible for
occupational safety and health in the workplace are unable to accurately
measure how many New Zealanders are dying or being seriously injured at
work, or the main causes and circumstances of the deaths and serious injury,
and therefore have no effective strategies to reduce the death and injury
rate”.
Professor Pearce notes that
this situation is not new and that New Zealand has had to rely on one
off surveys and incomplete data sets to estimate the true incidence of
occupational disease and injury.
The report finds that the data
currently used suffers from
• a lack of common definitions
and coding of occupation
• a lack of common definitions
and coding of disease and injury
• poor capture of occupational
history particularly in relation to occupational disease
• inadequate or nonexistent
coding of the occupational history information that is collected
• lack of expertise and resources
to manage and administer systems, particularly within the Department of
Labour
• the lack of anyone “in charge”
who can take responsibility for collecting, coding, analysing, and publishing
information on the annual burden of occupational disease and injury.
The report contains recommendations
for improving the quality of data collected from the various sources and
agencies and provides an integrated model for the surveillance of occupational
disease and injury in line with international best practice
The Committee was established
in 2003 and its role is to provide the Minister of Labour with independent,
contestable advice on major occupational health and safety issues. The
other members include Dr Evan Dryson (Occupational Medicine Specialist),
Dr Anne-Marie Feyer (PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sydney), Professor Philippa
Gander (Massey University) and Mr Selwyn McCracken (University of Otago).
Professor Neil Pearce Centre
for Public Health Research, Massey University, Wellington tel 04-380-0606
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