Occupational Safety and Health Surviellance in New York

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH), Bureau of Occupational Health (BOH) proposes to maintain and enhance occupational fatality and lung disease surveillance, investigate work situations high risk for injuries, fatalities and lung diseases, and formulate and disseminate prevention strategies to those who can intervene in the workplace. BOH will expand upon the existing Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (NY FACE) program to reduce the incident of work-related fatalities and injuries in NYS by increasing awareness of workplace hazards, and improving safety practices and policies among workers, employers, health and safety professionals, and equipment manufacturers. BOH will also continue to utilize the Occupational Lung Disease Registry (OLDR) to conduct surveillance for occupational lung diseases in NYS, undertake prevention efforts aimed at reducing and eliminating occupational lung diseases in NYS, and evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts. BOH has adopted a general approach to integrate the prevention activities of its programs. This approach is guided by several principles on behavior change in the health and safety literature. In order to achieve the ultimate goal of reducing the occurrence of work-related illnesses, injuries and fatalities, it is necessary to change the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of individuals within the working community. This is achieved concretely by intervening to increase awareness of workplace hazards among workers, changing workers' knowledge to prevent illnesses, injuries and fatalities, improving safety practices and compliance with safety programs, changing policies, improving safety programs and initiating engineering changes. These outcomes are represented by the goals established for the NY FACE and OLDR programs. In order to maximize the resources of BOH's programs, BOH plans to implement a decision logic model which should result in a more cost-effective program, enabling BOH to conduct more outreach while controlling costs. Several injury, fatality and lung disease incidents will be targeted each year for full site investigations. However, for a number of incidents that do not result in a full site investigation and where prevention information already exists, BOH will now utilize other information sources and partners to provide information specific to the event. This should allow BOH to reach a broader community within NYS. BOH plans to strengthen and enhance evaluation of the programs and materials as well, by determining if prevention materials and recommendations that are distributed are accepted and perceived useful by recipients, and if they result in changes in knowledge, workplace policies and behaviors.