Interventions to increase the reporting of occupational diseases by physicians: a Cochrane systematic review

Under-reporting of occupational diseases is an important issue in many countries. Timely and complete reporting is fundamental to a successful physician-based public health surveillance system and to plan intervention programmes and allocation of resources.

For physicians, the main reasons for under-reporting consist of lack of awareness regarding reporting requirements, time and effort involved in reporting and lack of benefit from reporting.

There are no systematic reviews of the effects of interventions for increasing the reporting (or reducing the under-reporting) of occupational diseases. Therefore, we conducted a Cochrane systematic review to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at increasing the reporting of occupational diseases by physicians.1

We searched the Cochrane Occupational Safety and Health Group Specialised Register, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), MEDLINE (PubMed), EMBASE, OSH UPDATE, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), Open-SIGLE and Health Evidence, up to January 2015.

We intended to include randomised controlled trials (RCTs), cluster-RCTs, controlled before-after (CBA) studies and interrupted time series (ITS), on the effects of increasing the reporting of occupational diseases by physicians, but we only identified RCTs and CBA studies.

Outcome measures were the reporting of occupational diseases measured either as the number of physicians reporting or as the rate of reporting occupational diseases.

Two authors independently assessed study eligibility and risk of bias, and extracted data. The results of similar studies were combined in a meta-analysis. …