SHOW PREVIEW
TREATING HEALTH LIKE SAFETY
Occupational health issues, as opposed to safety concerns, are being flung into the spotlight at this year’s Safety and Health Expo. Steve Perkins, chief executive of BOHS explains why this is crucial for the global workforce.
On the final day of the Safety and Health Expo in June a health symposium will take place with speakers from across the profession putting forward their views on occupational health.
Steve Perkins, chief executive of the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS), will be chairing a high-level panel debate on the logistics of how to treat health like safety.
The panellists will include former IOSH president Subash Ludhra, Clive Johnson from Land Securities, EEF’s Mark Partridge and Lawrence Waterman from Battersea Power Station Development Company.
In an interview with the editor of Health and Safety Week, Steve Perkins outlined the importance of occupational health and how the industry should promote it.
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WHAT ARE THE MAIN CHALLENGES THE
PROFESSION IS FACING
AROUND PROMOTING HEALTH? I think the main challenge is in understanding what sort of health we need to promote. I see health in terms of three overlapping areas.
Firstly, there is the clinical side which is focused on cure rather than prevention and is mainly the province of occupational health nurses and medics.
Secondly, we have the preventative side, which is about how we stop people getting ill from workplace risks. This isn’t really to do with the clinical
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disciplines, but rather the science and engineering of occupational hygiene, an area that’s gone under the radar for about a century in the UK. We’ve done a great job on safety, but now the effort needs to be focused on the area of prevention and controlling occupational health risks in the UK.
Finally, we have the wellbeing agenda. Interestingly, this is the aspect that’s being embraced by large corporations and has gained traction in the media. This is a good thing of course, as it puts the responsibility back on individuals for maintaining their own general health. However, the danger associated with wellbeing is that it can be easier to focus on aspects such as healthy eating and exercise programmes at the expense of the control of serious – even deadly – workplace health risks created by the employer.
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WHAT DO YOU THINK WE, AS A PROFESSION, CAN DO TO MAKE HEALTH MORE
PROMINENT? I don’t think people consciously sideline health; we have this phrase ‘health and safety’ and we say it as if it’s one word. I’ve discovered that ‘health and safety’ really has come to mean ‘safety’ over the last few decades. Health is different from safety.
Safety is so immediate – if someone falls off a ladder and suffers a fatal head injury then the effect is instant. This is a statistically simple event, with a quantifiable outcome of a single fatality – obviously with a tragic human dimension.
However, in the case of occupational health, workers are exposed to hazards over a long period of time and as the cumulative effect of that dosage builds up, they are at greater risk of contracting a disease. This long latency effect makes worker health figures far more difficult to quantify, but we disregard the occupational hygiene dimension at a great cost.
In simple economic terms, UK PLC is paying a massive price for the burden of work-related ill health. The HSE estimates that the cost to the economy of accidents and illness caused by current working conditions comes to £14.2 billion. Sixty per cent of that figure is due to
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