New Horizons for Occupational Health Surveillance

We congratulate Ahonen et al. for their challenge to the community of researchers concerned with inequities.¹ Readers may be surprised to learn that occupation is not a core sociodemographic factor in population statistics, nor do most studies of health inequities consider work despite its importance to the health of adults. We also appreciate the authors’ call for better occupational health surveillance. They note the limitations in both quality and content of existing surveillance data on work and health and suggest some ways these could be improved.

We wish to call to the attention of readers the recent report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine: A Smarter National Surveillance System for Occupational Safety and Health in the 21st Century.² The report presents a comprehensive review of available sources of routine case- and rate-based information about occupation and health. It then identifies a range of opportunities to improve existing sources or to implement new approaches that could address the call by Ahonen et al. to include work in population health research. The bottom line is that there is great promise for developing the data necessary to better understand the links between work and health inequities and to inform efforts to prevent these inequities.