Occupational Health
Introduction
For too long Occupational Health (OH) has been the ‘poor cousin’ in the H&S relationship, even though work related occupational health damage is a far greater problem than occupational accidents. Often it has not been generally understood that, while some 400 people die annually as a result of notifiable occupational accidents, perhaps as many as 10,000 die as a result of past exposure to harmful working conditions (several thousand due to exposure to a single hazardous agent, asbestos). HSE estimates that there are 2.1 million cases of ill health every year caused or made worse by work. Some 25,000 people leave the workforce annually due to work related injury or ill health. The costs to individuals, their families as well as to organisations and the economy as a whole are too big to ignore.
Two central themes in the HSC’s ‘Securing Health together’ strategy are:
- that occupational health must henceforth not just be about preventing health damage but also promoting good health and welfare; and
- that health at work must in future involve everyone, employers, unions, safety and health professionals, ‘intermediary’ organisations and not least employees themselves.
Addressing health at work is seen as having a major contribution to make in achieving the goals set out in the Government’s plans for improving public health generally.
Also, OH needs to be given a much more robust treatment within approaches to measuring OH&S performance generally (for example, within proprietary auditing systems) and encouragement should be given to more OH awards schemes. (In 2000 RoSPA introduced the ‘Astor Trophy for Occupational Health’, which was won in its inaugural year by East Herts NHS Trust.)
Secondly, there is the question of specialist services (occupational medicine, nursing, hygiene etc.). A start has been made with giving advice to employers on how they can get access to specialist services, but with emphasis on encouraging as much self-reliance as possible.
Thirdly, the emphasis on OH as a line management responsibility will mean that there will need to be new forms of training for managers. Nationally the current OS&H training ‘menu’ is still too heavily biased towards safety. Although there are numerous courses on principles of health and safety management as well as on issues such as COSHH, DSE, Manual Handling etc, there is still little specifically occupational health management training in place and certainly nothing which can assist the manager (as opposed to the health and safety professional) to understand the basic issues involved and develop an effective management response.
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