Methodologies to identify work-related diseases : review of sentinel and alert approaches

Occupational factors play a significant role in the global burden of disease. In addition, rapid changes in working conditions may give rise to new occupational health risks and work-related diseases (WRDs). Monitoring these new WRDs is essential from the perspective of early recognition and prevention. However, detecting new work-related risks and diseases may require additional instruments to those already used for monitoring known occupational diseases (ODs). Furthermore, it is not possible to detect new WRDs using a single method. A comprehensive approach is required, one that uses several complementary methods. The current report is the main deliverable of Task 1 of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA)'s 'Methodologies to identify work-related diseases - Review of sentinel and alert approaches' project. The overall objective of this project is to describe a number of approaches that have been taken to try to identify emerging health problems at work and WRDs. The main objective of this review is to provide insight into approaches to identify emerging WRDs and to complement the official figures of notified, recognised and compensated occupational diseases, which are usually the only comparative sources of information on the extent of health problems encountered at work. The aim of the report is to establish which systems and approaches are suitable for identifying new/emerging WRDs. Follow-up tasks to this review will seek to provide in-depth information on systems selected based on this review, through expert interviews and interactive discussions with and between systems' developers. The following research questions were addressed in this review. 1. What existing occupational safety and health (OSH) alert and sentinel systems can detect new/emerging WRDs? 2. What are the main characteristics of these systems? 3. What is the basic typology of these systems?