In February, NIOSH released its updated Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2019–2023. This new plan covers the breadth of the research and service work at NIOSH and is organized into the following seven strategic goals, representing the health and safety issues facing the U.S. workforce:
- Reduce occupational cancer, cardiovascular disease, adverse reproductive outcomes, and other chronic diseases.
- Reduce occupational hearing loss.
- Reduce occupational immune, infectious, and dermal disease.
- Reduce occupational musculoskeletal disorders.
- Reduce occupational respiratory disease.
- Improve workplace safety to reduce traumatic injuries.
- Promote safe and healthy work design and well-being.
To support the seven strategic goals, NIOSH created two sets of intermediate and activity goals. The first set is comprised of research goals that are shared by multiple NIOSH programs, fostering collaboration across the Institute. Sector, cross-sector, and core and specialty programs first reviewed the draft National Occupational Research Agendas (NORA) for the third decade of NORA written by NORA councils, thinking about which objectives or parts of objectives NIOSH is well suited to undertake. NIOSH programs also weighed additional factors, such as mandates from Congress and the Executive Branch, stakeholder input, innovative ideas, and emerging issues. The programs developed research priorities from these inputs using the Burden, Need, and Impact Method (BNI Method). This method helps NIOSH to decide how to allocate its research dollars since NIOSH is always faced with more research needs than we have resources to address. While the BNI method has been used at the individual project level for the past several years, this is the first time it has been used on a broader programmatic level.
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