Page History

No evidence of use of any of the occupation codes in value sets from VSAC, which makes it difficult to comment on relevance for the US.

This said, a few value sets use occupation codes (e.g., Care Team Member Function), but none of the codes from this particular list are. 

The list above is some kind of a subset and it is not entirely clear where it comes from.

Is is one for real?

One more thought: Wondering whether we should align SNOMED CT to other existing standards in this domain, e.g., International Standard Classification of Occupations from the International Labour Organization.

We do publish a Healthcare provider subset which is a subset of occupations. From that perspective, we know that occupations in healthcare are often specific to jurisdictions. CIHI is often used for their healthcare resources. For non-healthcare occupations, we refer to the National Occupational Classification published by Government of Canada that provides the "generic" occupations that are available in Canada: https://noc.esdc.gc.ca/

The list provided seems to include outdated content (milkman) or too specific occupations ( X draughtsman ). It would be worthed to clean it.

Most of these codes, however not all, are used in primary care in UK, however  we do not have access to secondary care data and possibly usage there is different. We had a recent content change request asking for  a change of the occupations to make them non gendered, for example police officer not policeman, firefighter not fireman.

In UK we have Standard Occupational Classification :

https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/standardoccupationalclassificationsoc

which also references ISCO (International Standard Classification of Occupations):

https://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/isco08/

There is also a well-known, shorter than SOC, list of professions used by insurance companies, called car insurance job picker, where each occupation is gender neutral with some exceptions that have both  -man and -woman versions (postman/postwoman, sportsman/sportswoman, draughtsman/draughtswoman, warehouseman/warehousewoman) : https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/insurance/car-insurance-job-picker/

Our preference would be to have occupations either non gendered  (eg police officer or -person) or where it is not possible, maybe to include both genders (postman/postwoman).