Over many years I have been considering how a number of long standing OHS problems could be resolved.
In many legal cases, particularly when seeking compensation for occupational disease and illnesses, the provision/collection of evidence is very difficult especially when lots of time has passed between exposure to the hazard be it asbestos, noise, vibration, beta naphthylamine, etc, etc and the onset of disease/illness/harm in whatever form it takes. [Physical accidents included too] The one person who knows intimately may be unable to remember with clarity when exposure occurred and even which employer is liable over a working life in excess of 40/50 years. [Or more given the increase in pensionable ages for the future].
He or she may even be dead before the case comes on.
What we need is a reference document –a working life passport or diary in which potential and actual exposures are recorded and validated each year from the day we start work. An extended CV if you wish. This would include details of the significant activities and the concomitant risks undertaken with results of monitoring surveys/investigations, RIDDORs, etc, both internal and external [HSE/Consultants/, etc]
Responsibility for ensuring this is undertaken would be placed on the employer who would also validate the record.
An accurate record would iron out the worst excesses of the forensic lottery that seeking compensation has been for decades.
In addition, the richness of the data would be invaluable for epidemiologists, researchers and OHS professionals and indeed would assist doctors in establishing a much more accurate cause of death using a background of long term exposure to other important factors.
Today for instance there were references on the radio to the dire effects of shift work which would be recorded too
Useful also in raising standards and potentially in recruitment [not forgetting the DDA]
What say you?
Something for IOSH to research?
Regards
Mike

Utopian.

There are the unknown life variables beyond work control - exposures through business trips by whatever medium, weekend long music festivals, that school trip through parliament, the walk by the river-bank

There are the yet to be determined - for example REACH and the re-classification of materials newly identified as (more) hazardous to health

The administrative nightmare of tracking departed employees to up date their passport with revised information on site/materials - along with others I was lost to the DWP & HMRC for two years thanks to an employer failing to present proper records.

It would need to be a huge document to track every possibility as per the old Quality Manager motto "if it moves measure and record it, and if it doesn't move measure and record it".

And in a population where some are desperate to share the minutiae of their life via the internet/social media finding the gems in that mountain of information?...needle & haystack

Seem to recall an NHS initiative where every registered patients full medical history would be available anywhere at the click of a button - they couldn't even get my paper file from the reception to my GP at the last visit.

great idea but note the comments already made

until humans become expensive nothing will happen and that date is around a million & more years in the future