• occupational injury

This supplement to Injury Prevention focuses on occupational injury prevention research. It comprises papers that were presented at the National Occupational Injury Research Symposium (NOIRS) 2000 held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 17–19 October 2000.

Injury prevention researchers and practitioners, whether focused on work related injuries or injuries in non-occupational settings, will find this collection of papers informative and relevant. Research on occupational injuries has relevance in other settings for several reasons: common methods, risks, and prevention strategies; overlap between work and non-work tasks and environments; and the advantage of work settings as natural laboratories for evaluation of interventions and technology transfer. Also, we share in the multifactorial nature of injuries that requires using interdisciplinary approaches to prevention.

Although occupational injuries and their prevention are sometimes distinct from injuries in other settings, there also are many common elements in research methods, risk factors, and prevention strategies. New research methods for risk factors, such as the case-crossover study design described in this issue, have advantages for many injury researchers (see Sorock et al).

Studies that elucidate risk factors and which develop and evaluate effective intervention strategies in one setting can often be applied in others. …