Evaluating Risks for Adverse Respiratory Health in Queensland Workers Exposed to Coal Mine Dust and Respirable Crystalline Silica: Exploration and Integration of Existing Data Systems

The project aims to evaluate existing administrative datasets maintained by Queensland regulatory, medical surveillance and workers’ compensation agencies to determine their usefulness in identifying occupational and personal risk factors for dust-related lung disease in coal mine workers, mineral and metal processing workers, and engineered stone workers.

The project has three aims:

Formal evaluations of datasets for coal mine and mineral and metal processing workers, which include Respiratory Health Surveillance Data, workers’ compensation datasets, regulatory dust monitoring data, and particle characterisation data.

The development of job-exposure matrices (JEMs) and workplace dust sample characterisation for the three populations of mineral dust-exposed workers.

The use of the information gathered from the evaluations and JEMs to perform epidemiologic analyses of trends and increased risk factors for dust-related lung disease.

The project aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the personal, exposure, and outcome factors available in the study datasets and identify those workers who appear more than once in the dataset for longitudinal analyses. The project will also quantify data quality issues such as missingness, erroneous/outlier observations, date ranges, and population sizes contained in the data across successive iterations of the health assessment.

Overall, the project aims to provide important insights into the risk factors associated with dust-related lung disease in workers and enhance understanding of the development of lung disease in different populations of workers.

This project sits within the MISHC Dust and Respiratory Health Program.