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Best Practices in Workplace Surveillance
The Argument for Descriptive Epidemiology
Using a Comprehensive Health Data Surveillance System Instead
of Daily or Weekly Injury Reports
Gordon Reeve
Ford Motor Company has developed and installed a
comprehensive injury/illness surveillance system that is in use at all
if it's US locations. The system called the Health Data Analysis (HDA)
System draws data from: 1) an electronic medical record system used by
all US plant medical department, 2) an incident investigation systems
used by all plant-level supervisors; and, 3) a Workers Comp system
data. Since its installation in the mid-1990's the HDA system has
become a critical tool for the plants' safety and ergonomic teams in
the identification of high-risk jobs and in the prioritization of
which jobs to fix first. Still, there are ongoing challenges to
obtaining optimal use of this system and the data it contains. One
persistent issue is the tendency for plant users to look at daily or
weekly data listings of incidents without looking back three or six
months to see what components of a department's or plant's overall
injury or illness pattern has changed. The author will describe the
HDA System in use at Ford Motor Company and will present several
examples of how such a temporarily narrow focus of surveillance can
miss many opportunities to make the workplace safer.
PDF Document (192 KB)
NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.