Key points
- The Occupational Health Equity Program seeks to eliminate avoidable work-related injury, illness, and death that are closely linked with social, economic, or environmental disadvantage.
- Not all workers have the same risk of experiencing a work-related health problem, even when they have the same job.
Overview
To Learn More
The Occupational Health Equity Program promotes research, outreach, and prevention activities that reduce health inequalities for workers who are at higher risk for occupational injury and illness as a result of social and economic structures historically linked to discrimination or exclusion.
A central challenge of securing occupational health equity is that the same structures that contribute to higher injury and illness risks also operate within occupational safety and health institutions, organizations, and programs. As such, workers are not only at greater risk for injury at work but also can be excluded from institutional efforts to document and prevent workplace illness and injury. Occupational health organizations need to continue developing the internal capacity and institutional relationships to effectively work with these communities. The Occupational Health Equity program helps NIOSH and its partners build infrastructure and capacity to integrate an equity perspective into their current health protection and health promotion approaches.
Program priorities
The OHE Program has selected research priorities on the basis of burden, need, and impact and collaborated with other NIOSH research programs to write the research goals in the NIOSH Strategic Plan for FYs 2019-2026. Priority areas include (but are not limited to):
- Promote research to identify, understand, and eliminate occupational health inequities closely linked with social, economic, and environmental disadvantage.
- Integrate inclusive research practices to reflect societal diversity and account for differing experiences of social conditions.
- Improve understanding of how work as a social determinant of health contributes to the inequitable distribution of illness, injury, mortality, and well-being.
What we've accomplished
- Developed a strategic plan on worker safety and health research and outreach priorities for American Indian and Alaska Native communities.
- Translated NIOSH's "Protéjase en el Trabajo" (Protect Yourself at Work) educational materials into English for adult English-language learners, including immigrant workers who speak dozens of primary languages.
- Published studies on occupational health inequities:
- Pre-pandemic differences in mental health and well-being within the health care workforce. Across the health care workforce, insufficient sleep (41.0%) and diagnosed depression (18.9%) were the most common conditions reported.
- COVID-19 mortality by the occupation and industry in which the person who died spent most of their working life.
- Characteristics associated with previous COVID-19 diagnosis, vaccine uptake, and intention to be vaccinated among essential workers in the US Household Pulse Survey.
- Visual representation of work as a social determinant of health (SDOH). This diagram highlights the centrality of work as a SDOH and the pathways that complicate the path to health equity.
- Pre-pandemic differences in mental health and well-being within the health care workforce. Across the health care workforce, insufficient sleep (41.0%) and diagnosed depression (18.9%) were the most common conditions reported.
What's ahead
In the future, the Program aims to:
- Publish study that analyzed interviews with low-socioeconomic status seafood workers in the Gulf of Mexico to examine risk factors for COVID-19, including SDOH.
- Publish study on vaccine perspectives among multilingual and diverse meat processing workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Examine mental health among workers in healthcare support occupations.
Resources
More information on specific workplace safety and health topics and useful resources can be found on the following pages:
- Overlapping vulnerabilities report -NIOSH and the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) authored a report which explores how the combination of social and economic risk factors may result in overlapping vulnerabilities for workers such as young immigrants in small construction firms and discusses the implications for OSH professionals.
- NIOSH Science Blog: Occupational Health Equity - Read NIOSH Science Blog posts related to Occupational Health Equity
- NIOSTIC-2 Database - See search results on health equity and disparities.