Occupational health is a condition of safety towards employee working in a concern. It’s a cross-disciplinary area which strives to protect the health and welfare of people engaged in an organization. The goal of all occupational health and safety programs is to create a safety working and peaceful environment to its employees. As a secondary factor, it also aims to protect co-workers, family members, employers, customers, suppliers, nearby communities, and other members of the public who are impacted by the workplace environment. Occupational health involves interactions among many subject areas, including occupational medicine, occupational hygiene, public health, safety engineering, chemistry, health physics, ergonomics, toxicology, epidemiology, environmental health, industrial relations, public policy, industrial sociology, medical sociology, social law, labour law and occupational health psychology. As long as humans have existed they have had to work. In the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution of Europe led to large numbers of individuals settling in cities and working in factories. As more and more people worked in factories, and the hazards of factory work became known, regulations came into place regarding who could work, and under what conditions. Initially, there were no restrictions on ages or hours of work, but gradually child-labor laws, laws regulating the work of women, and mandated maximum hours of work were put in place. There are no international standards that are universally utilized with regards to workplace safety and health, but such standards do exist for manufacturing production and quality-control issues regarding manufactured goods, since workers are rarely exposed only to one material at a time, and it includes issues such as workplace organization to see how this impacts on occupational safety and health of the employee. In workplace-related issues, one must note the interactions with normal life events and exposures; and care must be taken to fully understand what is truly workplace-related, what is not and where and when workplace exposures may have some role in the development of injuries or illnesses of labour. Common life events such as stress, smoking, drug use and other factors such as noise may interact with what goes on in the workplace. Thus establishing basic levels of health protection at all workplaces will help decrease inequalities in workers health between and within countries and strengthen the promotion of health at work. Thus ensuring access of all workers to preventing health services and link occupational health to primary health care. Improve the knowledge base for action on protecting and promoting the health of workers and establish linkages between health and work. |