Occupational Health and Safety: Essential Principles

Understanding Occupational Health and Safety

Health is a state of mental, physical, and social balance. The loss of these elements results from occupational accidents, occupational diseases, and other pathologies such as fatigue or job dissatisfaction.

Defining Workplace Injuries

A work-related injury is any disease, condition, or injury caused by reason or occasion of work. An occupational injury refers to any bodily harm suffered during or in consequence of work, including:

• Commuting accidents (while going to or returning from work).
• Non-listed occupational diseases contracted solely due to the execution of work.

Safety and Industrial Hygiene

Safety at work is a technique used to protect workers and reduce accidents. Occupational diseases manifest in the medium to long term as a result of prolonged exposure to harmful or inadequate environmental conditions.

Industrial hygiene is a prevention technique that aims to eliminate or prevent diseases caused by:

• Physical agents: Noise, humidity, temperature.
• Chemical agents: Corrosive, irritant, or carcinogenic substances.
• Biological agents: Bacteria, fungi, and parasites.

Effects: Pathological diseases such as deafness, dizziness, or vomiting.

Factors of occupational disease: Frequency of exposure, intensity of the contaminant, type and number of pollutants, and individual characteristics.

Ergonomics and Social Psychology

Ergonomics: A science that seeks to achieve maximum comfort for workers, combat fatigue, and optimize geometric, perceptual, temporal, and organizational aspects of the job.

Social psychology: The science that studies psychological damage suffered in the workplace and elements that produce job dissatisfaction.

Legal Framework and Responsibilities

Workers are entitled to effective protection and health safety. The starting point for regulation is the Framework Directive, which obliges Member States to enforce laws relating to occupational health and safety, transposed into national law (e.g., the Act on Prevention of Occupational Risks).

Core Principles

• Evaluate unavoidable risks.
• Fight risks at the source.
• Adapt work to the individual.

Rights and Duties of the Company

• Protect staff, specifically sensitive workers, minors, and pregnant women.
• Provide regular health surveillance.
• Offer training on prevention.
• Provide personal protective equipment (PPE).

Obligations of the Employee

• Meet standards based on training and instructions.
• Ensure proper use of work teams, equipment, and protection means.
• Do not tamper with or cancel any safety device.
• Contribute to the fulfillment of legal obligations.