Occupational Health

Work can be described as "The application of mental or physical effort to a purpose". Therefore, while each person has an ability to manage their own mental and physical efforts, a professional service is needed to help prevent problems arising as well as deal with them when they do - Occupational health.

Occupational health services fall under the following major headings:

• Chief Medical Officer - to provide leadership for any direct or indirect service, policy advice and, possibly, co-ordinate wellness and ill-health services.
• Pre-employment - to ensure that new staff are capable and that the Disability Discrimination Act is complied with. Online pre-employment questionnaires can be a low cost way of meeting this requirement.
• Surveillance - routine testing and health management to comply with specific regulations.
• Drug and alcohol testing - certain industries have a requirement for both ‘random' and ‘for cause' testing.
• Independent Management Assessments of cases referred by managers - generally those resulting from accidents and absences. Further, they may well be involved in decisions regarding early ill-health retirement.

Current Trends

There is an initiative to change the current sick note system to one of "fit notes" - and there is no doubt that occupational health will need to be actively involved in the provision of this service for it to be of benefit.

There is a further proposal for case management to be introduced "across the board" - this type of service will need to be tightly integrated into an organisations' working policies and practices.

All employers, of whatever size, should have access to an occupational health service. For large organisations some or all of the service could be in-house. The smaller an organisation is, the more likely it is to outsource some or all of its provision.

Most importantly, occupational health should be closely involved in ‘performance at work'.