Issue:
Across Canada, compensation boards, employers, unions, and health policy makers are increasingly preoccupied by occupational disease as a fiscal, administrative and planning challenge. One crucial gap is a system for tracking, recording and analyzing the incidence of key occupational diseases at the provincial and multi-provincial levels. This research proposes to assess the principal prevailing approaches to disease surveillance, including but not limited to registries, and to evaluate the appropriateness of each for a set of key occupational diseases both for specific provinces and at the national level.
Objectives:
The central objective is to analyze some prominent examples of exposure registries currently operating in Canada as well as in a few selected international locations. The research will seek to determine their strengths and their limitations for tracking occupational diseases, compare the exposed worker approach to other ways of tracking occupational disease, and assess the broader applicability of these approaches in various Canadian provinces.
Anticipated Results:
It is anticipated that the research will identify strengths and limitations of existing exposed worker registries in Canada and internationally. It is expected that the research will lead to the development of evidence-based methods for tracking occupational diseases.
Investigators:
Stephen Bornstein (Memorial University)
