Epiinjury - a collaborative learning project on occupational injury epidemiology

Abstract

It is widely agreed that statistical data are essential for accident prevention and benchmarking of the safety. The problem is that the data often are lacking or of low quality. The aim is to write and publish a textbook on occupational injury epidemiology on cohort studies based on registers with these main goals: 1) to improve the training of qualified personnel in injury epidemiology research and data administration and 2) to improve the quality of the existing and new injury and population databases in public and private companies, with the overall goal of 3) improving the safety learning culture that includes good data reporting, good data registers, and good research. The background is that the occupational injury registers are most often developed for administrative purposes, but the data are just as important for injury prevention. One of the problems is under-reporting, which can give serious bias when the data are used for pointing out the most hazardous areas and for comparison of the incidence rates. The direct reason is that reporting of an injury can have some unwanted effects, like fines and extra costs for the company. The indirect reason is related to the lack of a good safety learning culture. The bias can be reduced by using the most serious injuries, such as hospital-treated injuries, insurance data, and fatal injuries, but this does not improve the safety culture. Another important problem is the lack of specific and comparable inclusion criteria for the injuries and the lack of comparable population data. As a part of the safety culture, there is a need to improve the quality of the injury and population data registers and the epidemiological research to assist in reaching a zero-injury level. To improve the knowledge of injury epidemiology and injury data registers, adequate training is needed as part of an adequate safety learning culture. epidemiology and public health A textbook for training is relevant, but such a textbook is lacking. The aim is therefore to write and publish a textbook on occupational injury epidemiology on cohort studies based on registers to improve the safety learning culture to reach the zero-injury goal.

The publishing strategy under consideration.

The project was started based on an invitation from a large international publisher who already agreed to publish it as an e-textbook. Due to later considerations of what could be the best publishing strategy, the contract is not yet signed. As the intention is that the book should be revisable, available free to the public, and without "royalties" paid to the contributors, the Wikiversity seem a good place to do this.

Ethical guidelines

The International Epidemiological Associations´ (IEA) guidelines for proper conduct in epidemiologic research should be applied: http://www.ieatemp.com/goodEpiPractice.aspx Authorship and roles in the development should follow the Vancouver rules: http://www.icmje.org/ Permission from the authors and the publishers should be obtained to use the articles and other material

Project discussion

If you are interested in improving the project or have questions and comments about it, please join us on the Project Discussion page.

The questionnaire

The collaborative learning project on occupational injury epidemiology based on Registers is a research and learning project about occupational injury prevention. The research component is aimed at creating a review of the best practices injury epdemiology While the learning project aspect is aimed at helping people to do good studies and make better registersters.