Occupational Health Fundamentals

Work

Work is, in essence, the action that man performs to dominate or transform nature in order to obtain satisfaction for his needs, which are increasingly complex and far removed from those primitive needs of a purely biological order of his remote ancestors.

Work in History

Slavery had a very ancient origin, and already the Papirus Sellier II relates the sufferings, mutilations and deaths of the slaves who participated in the construction of the pharaonic monuments.

The corporate regime that began in the times of the Roman Empire in the cities for the arts and crafts provided the worker with better living conditions, even though agriculture continued to prevail.

The wage system, which began at the end of the Middle Ages and which is still in force today, has been applied both in the city and in the countryside, together with the system of cooperation since the end of the 19th century, with the idea of giving the worker the opportunity to share in the profits.

Each artisan was his own master; he worked in his own home without a fixed schedule, rested when he wanted, knew personally all the members of the community he served and even when he inherited his trade, he had a certain freedom to change it according to his vocation and aptitudes, and according to the demand of factors in his small community.

The Modern Concept of Health

The new conceptualization of health provided the basis for the World Health Organization to formulate its definition: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity".

Health and Work

health is a force that enables individuals to cope with life's contingencies with a minimum of suffering and disruption, and if one thinks on the other hand that work is an essential component of man's life, that it can offer him conditions conducive to adaptability and opportunities for the realization of his creative potentialities

Occupational Health and Productivity

Health, as a determining force in man's productive capacity, is the most effective means of raising labour productivity and should therefore be considered a prerequisite for development.

The Field of Occupational Health

Occupational health is not just a medical issue, which is easily understood. It goes beyond the boundaries of medicine, penetrating the jurisdiction of other disciplines both humanistic (psychology, anthropology and sociology), and disciplines derived from the exact sciences (engineering in all its branches - such as safety engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, etc.) and all sciences that have something to do with technology.

Basic Occupational Health Objectives:

To protect workers against the risks inherent in their work and the environment in which they carry it out.

Make it possible to allocate jobs according to the attitudes and limitations of each employee and ensure that their adaptation is permanent.

Promote and maintain the highest level of complete well-being (physical, mental and social) of workers.

The Workplace Accident

While the undesirable, unplanned, unexpected event that usually generates bodily injury has always existed, its impact on the social and economic structure of the world took on the dimension of a serious problem with the advent of the industrial age.

Accident Syndrome

which it defines as a set of signs, symptoms and circumstances, dynamic and variable, whose presence is capable of determining the occurrence of an accident with or without injury.

Industrial Psychology

Psychology began to be a science independent of philosophy, its original trunk, when it became an experimental science at the end of the 19th century. Modern industrial psychology began in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory of experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig, which was the starting point for the application of the psychological discipline to pedagogy, industry and sociology.

The Psychotechnique

was in turn the first expression of industrial psychology, and this term seems to have been used for the first time by Fechner, but it is to William Stern's credit that he defined it precisely in 1903 as "applied psychology which by appropriate procedures provides the means to achieve ends of some value".