Occupational health (OH) is a multi-disciplinary approach to maintaining the well-being of those in a workplace, preventing and removing ill-health and developing solutions to keep staff with health issues at work. OH professionals provide independent advice on staff unable to work due to long-term or short-term intermittent health problems, and organisational wide steps to reduce sickness absence.
OH organises successful return to work, protect vulnerable employees from workplace hazards. It can assist workplaces in keeping employees at all stages of their working life, helping at difficult times (such as bereavement, maternity, recovery after hospital admissions or treatment). Effective OH is analytical, cathartic and therapeutic.
SOM recently produced a report on the Value of Occupational Health to Workplace Wellbeing, which examined how occupational health practitioners and providers can add value to workplace wellbeing initiatives.
A worker’s relationship with his or her line manager is perhaps the most important relationship in the workplace. Research has indicated that good and supportive relationships between workers and their line managers are associated with better health and wellbeing outcomes, including sustainable return to work following sickness absence due to common mental health problems. Line managers also have a key influence on how work is performed, clarifying role expectations, delegating authority to make decisions and role modelling appropriate behaviours that set the tone for the social climate at work – thus potentially affecting job quality and social relations at work.
There is a clear role for occupational health providers to engage in line manager training around return to work, making workplace accommodations in a fair and equitable manner and supporting workers with health conditions or caring responsibilities.
Workplace health promotion programmes targeted at changing health behaviours (e.g. alcohol consumption, smoking, exercise, diet) are familiar to occupational health practitioners. Workplace health promotion programmes targeted at improving health behaviours may also work to change organisational cultures. In turn, this might create an environment in which communications concerning health and wellbeing are better received by workers and so facilitating the introduction of a range of other initiatives targeted at improving health and wellbeing. Workplace wellbeing advisers may assist with this.
Occupational health practitioners cannot deliver change by themselves. Instead they build the capacity to deliver change with employee benefit organisations and other professionals such as workplace wellbeing advisers
Nick Pahl, chief executive officer at society of occupational medicine.