Most EU countries register occupational diseases in a national registry, while some have additional schemes for the surveillance of occupational diseases [ 13- 15].
The Spanish Ministry of Labour registry of occupational injuries causing absence from work includes information on individual and occupational characteristics of injured workers and events.
In other cases, they wrote special computer scripts, which they used to pick up whole databases from online sources like Maryland's registry of occupational licenses (barbers, architects, plumbers) or from free commercial address databases like Verizon's SuperPages, an online yellow pages directory.
And just two weeks ago in Alaska, the American Civil Liberties Union -- a strong advocate of openness and access to public documents -- took up the cause of Maryjane Hinman, a nurse who had lobbied unsuccessfully to have her home address removed from the state's online registry of occupational licenses.
3. The ODIT can serve as a starting point for a quality improvement process of registries of occupational diseases.
Together, these indicators form a tool which can be used for quality improvement of registries of occupational diseases.
As far as we know, other tools for quality assessment and quality improvement of national registries of occupational diseases do not exist.
2. We have developed indicators for quality assessment of registries of occupational diseases related to preventive policy on a national level.
The output of registries for occupational diseases in relation to preventive policy can be divided in alert information and monitor information.
There are several complications, partly intrinsic to registries of occupational diseases, which has to be taken into account for the application of the tool.
Which indicators determine the quality of national registries of occupational diseases with respect to their ability to provide appropriate information for preventive policy?
