Occupational Health

Occupational health is a specialist branch of medicine that focuses on the physical and mental wellbeing of employees in the workplace.

The aim of occupational health is to prevent work-related illness and injury by:

• encouraging safe working practices;
• ergonomics (studying how you work and how you could work better);
• monitoring the health of the workforce;
• supporting the management of sickness absence.

An occupational health service might also:

• work with your employer to implement policies and ensure health and safety compliance;
• conduct pre-employment health assessments;
• support health promotion and education programmes;
• provide advice and counselling to employees around non-health-related problems;
• provide your employer with advice and guidance around making reasonable adjustments to your working conditions.

Many small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) do not have the size of workforce, or sufficient money, to sustain a dedicated occupational health service. For these reason, many SMEs use external occupational health providers as and when they need it to support their staff and carry out medicals and other occupational health assessments.

If you think you need occupational health services, you should always speak to us in the first instance to understand what services are available and how you can access them.

Occupational health aims to ensure that organisations can be as effective as possible with protecting their employees’ health and well-being. Through practical occupational health management of employees’ health and care issues, early intervention and clinical assistance has widespread business benefits, including:

• Conforming to health and safety legislation
• Improved staff motivation and performance ultimately increases profitability
• Informed recruitment and deployment results in a reduction in staff turnover, better staff attendance and retention and an increased public image of the company making it more attractive as an employer
• Prevention of disabling illness/disease
• Reduced risk and cost of litigation
• Identification of reasons for non-attendance, trends and patterns within departments, allowing the opportunity to take preventative and corrective action
• Increased profit and productivity
• Happy staff that know the organisation is interested in their wellbeing

For more information on how we can help you with an occupational health issue, contact us