Now is the time to improve the education of Occupational Safety and Health personnel!

Abstract

All Danish companies with more than 10 employees are obliged to establish a formal Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) structure, in which managers and employee-selected Health and Safety Representatives work together to secure a safe and healthy workplace. The compulsory education for all OSH-personnel aims to provide participants with competencies, which enables them to perform this important task. Hence, the compulsory OSH education establishes the professional basis of the preventive and intervening OSH work in all these companies. While the psychosocial work environment is among the most challenging factors in OHS, the education does not, however, sufficiently prioritize knowledge and skills related to the psychosocial work environment. In this paper, we demonstrate how such insufficient formal prioritization of the psychosocial work environment has potential subsequent consequences. The prioritization is insufficient with regard to both required content and requirements for specialized competencies of the providers of the OSH education. We extend the analysis to encompass the evaluation of the OSH education and the specialized OSH courses as well. Finally, we make several suggestions on how to improve the OSH education, specifically in relation to the psychosocial work environment.