Occupational Safety and Health Surveillance in New York State

The NYS Department of Health, Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention (BOHIP), plan to use funds from this Program Announcement to expand and improve our current occupational health surveillance programs. Recognizing that many occupational hazards and adverse health outcomes overlap other public health programs, we will continue to incorporate our data into other public health tracking systems and will explore potential opportunities to get industry and occupation variables included in their infectious disease surveillance databases. We will evaluate data to identify high-risk industries and occupations and populations at high- risk and direct our prevention strategies towards these populations. The integration of occupational health into public health practice has the additional benefit of being able to assist with dissemination of information. We will continue to collect, review, follow up and monitor adult blood lead data, which can be used for worksite investigations and intervention activities, and continue our collaboration with the NYS Childhood Lead Prevention Program to ensure prompt identification of lead poisoned pregnant women and follow-up of their newborn babies. BOHIP proposes to continue our surveillance efforts of all occupational lung diseases while focusing and enhancing our surveillance of work-related asthma. To do this, we will translate past successes into the development and implementation of occupational prevention, intervention, and outreach activities. We also propose to continue our work on the Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) project. The goal of the FACE project is to reduce the occurrence of work-related non-fatal and fatal injuries by establishing a strong workplace safety culture through changing the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals within the NYS working community. We will target fatal injuries among self-employed workers, older workers (>65 years of age), Hispanic or Latino workers, agricultural workers, and construction workers.