How Job-Related Data Benefits You

Use the Worker Health Charts to learn how work affects health. Worker Health Charts allows users to chart hard-to-find work-related health data. Anyone can use this free web application to learn about work-related safety and health.

Researcher using worker health charts to learn about work-related lead exposure

Researcher using worker health charts to learn about work-related lead exposure

How Worker Health Charts can answer your job safety and health questions

There are many things that cause sickness and injuries. We can get sick when our kids bring home a virus, sprain our ankles when we fall down the back porch steps, or feel stressed when we buy and sell a house. But, we often forget that our jobs can also take a toll on our:

Physical health
Mental health
Social well-being

The workplace may expose you to many types of hazards:

biological (e.g., viruses)
chemical (e.g., pesticides)
physical (e.g., falls)
psychosocial (e.g., job stress)

Some industries and occupations are more hazardous than others. Research helps identify and confirm new and ongoing workplace hazards. There are many data sources that regularly collect information on work-related health data. However, these data sources may be difficult to find and hard to understand. But, what if you could go to one website to access many of these data sources?

And what if the data were shown in a way that you could quickly look at the information and interpret it?

Worker Health Charts is a web application created by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). This charting tool allows users to chart worker health information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources of work-related exposure data.

It was created for many types of users, all with a main purpose in mind – “How can people better use worker health data to understand what’s happening in their workplace?”

Worker Health Charts can be used by anyone. It allows quick analysis of work-related safety and health data that may be difficult to find or are not charted elsewhere. Users select from dropdown options to create work-related charts that show rates, distribution, and trends in safety and health topics.

How different people can use Worker Health Charts

We each have a different reason for why we seek information on a topic. Below, we describe how three different groups of people may use Worker Health Charts:

Researchers and Public Health Professionals
Employers and Workers
General Public

Researchers and Public Health Professionals

Researchers and public health professionals are constantly looking at data to identify emerging public health problems. They can use worker health charts to describe worker safety and health trends.

For example:

Dr. Jane Smith, an epidemiologist in Florida, is interested in work-related lead exposure. She uses Worker Health Charts to look at the trend of work-related lead poisoning cases among adults from 2002-2012. She sees that lead poisoning cases went down from 2002 to 2007, but went up from 2007 to 2012. She is concerned about this shift in pattern and contacts the local health department to explore why lead poisoning cases have been increasing.