Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 133 
Also, universities, research institutes and professional associations, for example, the International 
Association of Labour Inspection (IALI), 448 publish data on the national OSH situation, sometimes in a 
comparative perspective.  
In areas closely related to OSH, for example, in the fields of public health, pension and social insurance 
developments, industrial relations, labour law, aspects of OSH are often touched upon. This research is 
focused on data and analyses on the development of contract types, of wages, working times, and social 
insurance systems and similar, which are closely connected to OSH .449 Others cover the relation 
between working and living conditions , including aspects like living styles, mobility, housing, childcare, 
elderly care. 
Particularly during the last decade , publicly available dashboards and data collections  have been 
developed in many OSH -related areas. To mention some provided by EU  institutions: the Cedefop 
Skills Panorama on the development of skill requirements and actual skills at European enterprises and 
work places , 450  the EIGE Gender Equality Index , 451  the ECHA databases on workplace exposure 
scenarios of chemical substances ,452 the ECDC dashboards on communicable diseases ,453 EMSA on 
safe work in the marine sector,454 the FRA reports on severe labour exploitation of migrants and survey 
on violence against  women,455 and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction on 
the use of traditional and modern drugs at work places .456 The European Commission Directorate-
General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) provides indicators and data on health status and 
health systems.457 Although the core objectives of the data collections and analysis of these institutions 
do not specifically include work, working conditions or OSH, many of their results shed a light on 
particular aspects of health and safety at workplaces.  
Many national surveys and statistical evaluations add to this, often with more detail and closely related 
to the national economic and political infrastructure and its working conditions legislation. The different 
national situations to whi ch the institutes refer to and the different methodologies that the national 
institutions use make it hard to impossible to compare countries based on these national data. 458 
However, the differences seem to be minor if the questions in European or national  surveys are very 
similar.  
‘Second, when the surveys do include similar questions, the responses seem to be similar across 
surveys. This was illustrated with a question on overall satisfaction with the working conditions and/or 
overall job satisfaction. S uch a question is included in the EWCS as well as the German BIBB/BAuA 
survey and the NWCS in the Netherlands. It was shown that findings from the national surveys are very 
similar to findings from the EWCS, which indicates that, at least for this question , methodological 
differences between the surveys do not lead to different findings. While this implies that the integration 
of the datasets is in theory possible, the problem remains that the national surveys share few questions 
that are exactly the same, in addition to the methodological challenges highlighted above’. 459 
Also, international institutions  provide information that covers in some cases all but often only a 
selection of EU Member States. These are,  for example,  the OECD, wh ich publishes overarching, 
general and country reports on economic and sectoral developments, and on infrastructures of t he 
health system. International organisations like the ILO and its data collections and ‘National profiles on 
occupational safety and health’ 460 contribute to the richness of data. The WHO and its Regional Office