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Who works where? Building occupational research capacity in the BC Linked Health Database
June 2005
| Principal Investigator: |
Mieke Koehoorn (University of British Columbia) |
| Co-Investigators | Kimberlyn McGrail, Kay Teschke, Chris McLeod, Jafaar Aghajanian Fan Xu (University of British Columbia) |
For more information about this development grant project, please contact Dr. Mieke Koehoorn.
Issue
The Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia is home to the British Columbia Linked Health Database (BCLHD). The BCLHD is among the richest data resources in the world for population health and health services research. It includes longitudinal, person-specific, health data on BC's four million residents, from 1985 forward.
The purpose of this project was to enhance the capacity of the BCLHD for work and health research by creating an “industry of employment” variable within the database.
Key findings
- An industry of employment code was successfully assigned to 91% of the workers in the BCLHD who had employer-paid health premiums. This allowed the identification of industry of employment for about 47% of the B.C. workforce.
- An industry of employment code is now available in the BCLHD data holdings for researchers to include in population and workforce studies.
Objectives
- To create an industry of employment variable for B.C. workers in the BCLHD, by assigning an industry code to employers who pay health premiums.
- To determine what proportion of the B.C. workforce can be assigned an industry of employment code using this technique.
Method
A ‘crosswalk' was developed between an employer field (representing the payer of the provincial health premium) in the BCLHD registration file and an industry-coded employer field in WorkSafeBC's registry. Both computer programming and manual searches were used to create the crosswalk. The end product is an industry coding file that can be merged with individuals in the registration file whose employer pays their health premium via their specific employer-paid premium provider code.
The industry coding file is covered by the same privacy protocols as other BCLHD data held by the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research. When approved for use in future research projects through a data access request process, only the industry of employment code will be released to researchers. The premium provider code and the employer name are not part of the data holdings available for research purposes and will not be released to researchers.
In order to assess the coverage of the industry coding file for research purposes, the coding file was then linked to the 2001 registration file of B.C. residents.
Results
13,578 employers of the 15,833 unique employers in the BCLHD for 2001 were successfully matched with the WorkSafeBC Registry (86% success rate for assigning an industry code to an employer).
52% of the B.C. workforce (1,000,130 individuals) could be identified as workers in the BCLHD for 2001 using employer-paid health premiums. Some B.C. workers do not have employer-paid health premiums, and were therefore not identified as “workers” using this approach. A total of 908,430 workers were successfully assigned an industry of employment code (91% success rate for known workers).
Using this approach, the researchers were able to identify and assign an industry of employment code to 47% of the BC workforce at the population level.
Conclusions
The addition of industry codes enhances the BCLHD capacity for investigating questions on the relationships between work and health, and on labour market and workers' compensation experiences at the population level. In particular, it enables surveillance of disease and injury by industry of employment at the population workforce level using a variety of health and health services data.
The researchers recommend the use of the employment and industry variables in the BCLHD database for research purposes, while recognizing that some employee groups may be underrepresented by these variables.
Future directions
Three research projects are either underway or proposed that will request access to the industry of employment variable and will serve as pilot tests for the new variable.
The research team is also continuing to develop and refine the industry variable, for example by updating employer coding beyond 2001.
The industry of employment variable will be a cornerstone of the occupational research component of the Population Health and Learning Observatory (PHLO), an umbrella organization funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. The objective of the PHLO is to support population health research by expanding and developing data sources and linkages between databases.
Publications and presentations
Koehoorn M, Aghajanian J, McGrail K, Teschke K, McLeod C (2005). Building Research Capacity to Investigate Questions on Work and Health (accepted). SafetyNet and CARWH International Conference. St. John's, Newfoundland, June 7-10 th, 2006.Koehoorn M, Aghajanian J, McGrail K, Teschke K, McLeod C. Building Research Capacity to Investigate Questions on Place and Health. Canadian Public Health Association 96th Annual Conference. Ottawa, ON . September 18-21, 2005.
Koehoorn M, McGrail K, Teschke K, Aghajanian A, and McLeod C. Who Works Where? Occupational Injury and Disease Surveillance in British Columbia. 18th International Symposium on Epidemiology in Occupational Health. Bergen, Norway, September 11-14, 2005.
Koehoorn M. Who Works Where: Building Occupational Research Capacity in the Population Health and Learning Observatory. PHLO Seminar Series, University of British Columbia, October 28, 2004.