Occupational health in ICD11

At the dawn of the nineteenth century the first international classification of diseases (ICD) was born and it has grown steadily until reaching its current 10th edition. The 10th edition was manually compiled in 1989 being published only in English. WHO made the Alpha draft of ICD11 publicly available in May 2011. In the intervening 22 years there has been an information revolution and great steps have been taken in biomedical science. A new edition of ICD is therefore timely and it is being produced with digital curation methodology. ICD is developing and adapting to the modern era so that it will be available electronically on an internet based platform. The advent of electronic health records gives the opportunity to advance the use of ICD using standardized terminologies that map to the knowledge in the ICD. One of the key improvements in ICD will be to serve this need.  The Global Plan of Action on Workers'' Health endorsed with Resolution  WHA60.26 from 2007 requested WHO to determine international exposure and  diagnostic criteria for early detection of occupational diseases and to include  occupational causes of diseases in ICD11.  A working group for occupational health in ICD11 was established by the WHO Global Occupational Health Programme with input from the Network of WHO Collaborating Centres for Occupational Health. The internationally recognised and recently revised ILO list of occupational diseases was compared with ICD10 to identify the degree of representation and the need for consideration of inclusions within ICD11.   ICD11 now incorporates a linearisation for occupational health. This feature effectively creates an occupational version of ICD11. The process of ICD revision, production of content models for occupational diseases and the functionality of ICD11 will be described.  Participants will be informed about the opportunities for contribution and comment on the Beta version.