Effective occupational health care at the workplace requires collaboration, partnerships and alliances with internal, interface and external stakeholders. Essential steps for solid work with various stakeholders are identification of key stakeholders, systematic analysis of their views and positions, and development of stakeholder participation and involvement. Stakeholder analysis aims to eval...

In order to ensure equality of occupational health care among employees of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and of larger companies amendments in the regulations of the numerous German accident insurance funds had to be made to provide for full availability of services, as requested by German and European law. According to these amendments, sectors formerly exempted due to small size a...

BACKGROUND There are still uncertainties regarding the respective prevalence, diagnosis and management of occupational asthma (OA) and work-exacerbated asthma (WEA). There is as yet no standardized methodology to differentiate their diagnosis. A proper management of both OA and WEA requires tools for a good phenotyping in terms of control, severity and quality of life in order to propose case-s...

It has been argued that occupational physicians should 'keep our white coats and stethoscopes'. and it is a sentiment which-1 wholeheartedly support as ours' is a clinical specialty. However, no physician in any specialty can divorce themselves from the economics of health care provision which are of increasing concern for politicians, managers and society. Occupational physicians need to under...

BACKGROUND Underreporting occupational disease cases has been a long-standing problem in Taiwan, which hinders the progress in occupational health and safety. To address this problem, the government has founded the Network of Occupational Diseases and Injuries Service (NODIS) for occupational disease and injury services and established a new Internet-based reporting system. OBJECTIVES The aim...

BACKGROUND It has been suggested that frequent-, short-term sick leave is associated with work environment factors, whereas long-term sick leave is associated mainly with health factors. However, studies of the hypothesis of an association between a poor working environment and frequent short spells of sick leave are few and results are inconsistent. Therefore, we aimed to explore associations ...

In this article, I examine the state of mental health research in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy from 2008 to 2011. Although other practice areas have seen an increase in the number and rigor of intervention effectiveness studies, mental health occupational therapy research has been insufficient to support the profession's role in traditional mental health services. Strategies to ...

Since the antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, physicians had been observing the harmful effects and the illnesses in people who worked in manufacture and/or mining. They would draw attention to such effects and propose solutions which often entailed improvement of working conditions and environment. The ancient physicians from Varazdin had been familiar with such literature, accepted the ...

AIM With the overall objective to develop future strategies for a more health-promoting health service in Sweden, the aim of this paper was to describe how health personnel view barriers and possibilities for having a health-promoting role in practice. MATERIALS AND METHODS Seven focus group discussions were carried out with a total of 34 informants from both hospital and primary health care ...