Abstract
The workplace is an ideal setting for health promotion. The regular medical examination of workers enables us to screen for numerous diseases, spread good practices and correct lifestyles, and obtain a favourable risk/benefit ratio. The continuous monitoring of the level of workers’ wellbeing using a holistic approach during medical surveillance enables us to promptly identify problems in work organisation and the company climate. Problems of this kind can be adequately managed by using a participatory approach. The aim of this paper is twofold: to signal this way of proceeding with medical surveillance, and to describe an organisational development intervention. Participatory groups were used to improve occupational life in a small company. After intervention we observed a reduction in levels of perceived occupational stress measured with the Effort/Reward Imbalance questionnaire, and an improvement in psychological wellbeing assessed by means of the Goldberg Anxiety/Depression scale. Although the limited size of the sample and the lack of a control group call for a cautious evaluation of this study, the participatory strategy proved to be a useful tool due to its cost-effectiveness.
Highlights
The workplace is an ideal setting for health promotion
The observations formulated during the GEPs© were initially analysed using a grid composed of the 10 variables that contribute to determining work-related stress
Our study demonstrates that medical surveillance in the workplace can lead to a positive continuous health promotion activity, thereby encouraging healthy lifestyles and correct health practices in the population
Summary
The workplace is an ideal setting for health promotion. The employer is compelled to set up a health surveillance service for employees exposed to occupational health risks. This mandatory medical examination offers a valuable opportunity for gathering information on the health and wellbeing of workers. The transition from an activity that focused exclusively on the prevention of occupational diseases toward a strong commitment to health promotion is a natural evolution for occupational medicine that originated when levels of pollution in the workplace were much higher than today and social conditions were very different from the current ones. Nowadays psychosocial risk factors are of prime importance in occupational health [1,2,3,4,5], and require physicians to take a “holistic” rather than a “laboristic” approach to occupational health services in order to deal with these problems in the best possible way [6,7,8]
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