Work-related Health: Core Areas regarding Knowledge and Competence

OHA’s can contribute by helping managers to control sickness absence more efficiently. The nurse may be concerned in helping to educate line managers and supervisors in the way to best use the ALSO service, in how to be able to refer staff, what form of information will be necessary, what to expect coming from occupational health. By creating transparent referral procedures, ensuring that medical confidentiality is maintained understanding that the workers’ rights are usually respected the OHA can do much to make sure that employees referred for assessment as a result of sickness absence are more comfortable with the process.

OH nurse practitioners, with their close connection with workers, knowledge with the working environment and trends in ill-health inside the company are often in the good position to suggest management on preventing disease absence. In my experience affiliate to General Practitioners use a limited use for perform related issues, and gain best results by along with keeping the GP mindful, referring to a expert occupational physician.

Planned treatment strategies, can help to ensure safe come back to work for employees who have been absent from work as a result of ill-health or injury. The nurse is frequently the key person inside the rehabilitation programme who can, with the manager and also individual employee, complete any risk assessment, devise the particular rehabilitation programme, monitor progress and talk to the individual, the OH physician as well as the line manager. Nurses have become involved in adding proactive rehabilitation strategies that make an effort to detect early changes inside health before such conditions bring about absence from work. Bettering and sustaining working capacity benefits many groups, the average person, the organization and community, as costly absence as well as other health care costs are usually avoided.

In many cases the OH nurse must work within the organization because the clients advocate in order making sure managers appreciate fully the worth of improving the fitness of the workforce. OH nurses hold the skills necessary to undertake this work and may even develop areas of specific interest.

The occupational health registered nurse may develop pro-active strategies to help the workforce sustain or restore their perform ability. New workers, more mature workers, women returning to perform following pregnancy or workers who have been unemployed for a prolonged time frame may all benefit from health advice or even a planned programme of work hardening exercises to aid maintain or restore their particular work ability even before any health conditions arise. Increasingly the problems experienced by industry are of your psychosocial nature and these may be even more complex and costly to manage. OH nurses, working on the company level, are in a good position to offer advice to management on strategies which can be adopted to improve the psycho-social overall health of workers.

Health and also safety

The OHA can use a role to play in developing safe practices strategies. Where large, or risky, organizations have their own in-house safe practices specialists the OHA could work closely with these specialists to make sure that the nurses expertise inside health, risk assessment, health surveillance and enviromentally friendly health management is totally utilized into the safe practices strategy. Occupational health nurses are trained in safe practices legislation, risk management and the particular control of workplace side effects and can therefore produce a useful contribution to the general management of safe practices at work, with particular focus on ‘health’ risk assessment.

Threat identification

The nurse often has close experience of the workers and knows changes to the functioning environment. Because of the nurses expertise inside the effects of work on health they may be in a good position being involved in hazard recognition. Hazards may arise as a result of new processes or functioning practices or may arise away from informal changes to present processes and working practices the nurse can readily identify and assess the likely risk from. This activity requires and also pre-supposed regular and frequent place of work visits by the work-related health nurse to maintain an updated knowledge and awareness regarding working processes and procedures.

Risk assessment

Legislation in Europe will be increasingly being driven by way of a risk management approach. OHA’s are competed in risk assessment and chance management strategies and, depending upon their amount of expertise and the degree of complexity involved in the chance assessment, the nurse can tackle risk assessments or contribute on the risk assessment working strongly with other specialists.

Advice on control strategies

Having been mixed up in hazard identification and chance assessment the occupational well being nurse can, within the limits of these education and training, provide advice and information on appropriate control strategies, which includes health surveillance, risk connection, monitoring and on the particular evaluation of control techniques.

Research and the usage of evidence based practice

Specialist OHA’s utilize research findings from many disciplines, including nursing, toxicology, mindsets, environmental health and public health inside their daily practice. The principal requirement with an occupational health nurse in practice is they’ve the skills to examine and critically assess study findings from these different disciplines and in order to incorporate the findings into evidence based way of their practice. Research in nursing is well established and there exists a small, but growing, body of evidence being produced by occupational health nursing research workers who investigate occupational well being nursing practices. OHA’s should ensure they’ve access to and the relevant skills necessary to base their practice around the best available evidence. On the company level occupational health nurses could be involved in producing management reports on as an example sickness absence trends, automobile accident statistics, assessment of well being promotion needs and inside evaluating the delivery regarding services, the effectiveness regarding occupational health interventions. Research skills and the opportunity to transfer knowledge and details from published research to apply is an important part of the role.