An annotated timeline: the public health approach and strategic planning in occupational injury research and prevention
| 1937 | Edward Godfrey's remarks to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association and published in the American Journal of Public Health call for public health departments to take on the prevention of accidents, for the techniques of epidemiology to be applied to accidents, and for the emphasis on descriptive statistics to move toward an emphasis on prevention and control. |
| 1949 | John Gordon's remarks published in the American Journal of Public Health call for epidemiologic analysis as a means for better understanding and guiding prevention of accidents. |
| 1970 | The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) of 1970 is promulgated, creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). |
| 1977 | The NIOSH Division of Safety Research was created to serve as the focal point for the NIOSH occupational safety research program. |
| 1979 | NIOSH Division of Safety Research management outlines the division's safety research strategy in a Professional Safety article. |
| 1980 | In Public Health Reports, William Haddon claimed that the application of epidemiology to injury control had been largely ignored in the decades since the 1940s, but that “...as a public health problem, injuries may eventually command the attention from public health people that is more nearly proportionate to their prominence as the leading cause of death in the United States from the first year of life to middle age”. |
| 1985 | The publication of Injury in America, which is notable for its recommendation to establish an injury prevention research center within the federal government and for evidencing that injury prevention and control was finally becoming a mainstream focus of the national public health community. |
| Publication of the congressionally sponsored study, Preventing Illness and Injury in the Workplace, which produced a wide range of recommendations for preventing and controlling occupational injuries and illnesses. | |
| 1989 | Publication of the NIOSH national strategies for preventing the leading 10 occupational illnesses and injuries, which includes a strategy for traumatic occupational injury, and called for the rigorous application of scientific methods and approaches, including epidemiology, to the study of occupational injury. |
| 1992 | Proceedings of Setting the National Agenda for Injury Control in the 1990s recommends development of a comprehensive surveillance system, increased emphasis on studying control technologies, and that NIOSH should conduct more research and intervention studies, and academic researchers should also focus on identifying risk factors and evaluating preventive strategies through analytic epidemiology. |
| 1996 | Publication of the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) by NIOSH and partners identifies 21 priority topic areas, including traumatic occupational injury. |
| 1998 | Publication of Traumatic Occupational Injury Research Needs and Priorities by the NORA Traumatic Injury Team which uses the public health model as a framework to identify the research needs and priorities in each phase of the public health process, from surveillance to communication and evaluation. |