Future role of occupational safety and health (OSH) experts and the mutual recognition of qualifications

Andrew Hale, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

Chair of the Certification Committee of the European Network of Safety & Health Professional Organisations

Abstract

OSH experts have history of development spanning over 150 years, which differs markedly across countries. They derive from diverse disciplines and have formed many professional groups. From them is developing a broad prevention discipline needed to fulfil European legislation. Recent developments have seen the production of a minimum standard for the competence of these professionals at European level to increase transparency and aid movement of professionals and their knowledge between countries.

Origins

There is a long history of OSH experts, which we can trace back to the appointment of the first four inspectors of factories in the UK in 1833. Those men had no specific qualifications for their work, which largely consisted of tracking down textile factories exceeding the permitted hours of work, employing under-age children, and failing to meet their obligations to the morals and the education of those children. From 1844, when safety of machinery was added to the statutes, technical skills became important. In addition doctors were appointed to check children’s ages and health and to investigate accidents. So we see the beginnings of the safety professionals, with their technical education, and the occupational physicians, with their medical approach, whose professional disciplines still dominating the OSH scene in almost all countries to this day.

Diversity

To these two groups have been added a whole range of other professional groups: occupational hygienists, ergonomists, occupational health nurses, work psychologists – some concerned largely with stress and well-being, others focussing on leadership, participation and organisational change – fire prevention experts and fire fighters, health physicists working with radiation, and a host of other smaller groups. This has resulted in some confusion among companies about which experts they need to employ for what technologies, hazards and activities. It has also resulted at times in professional rivalry between the groups, claiming overlapping areas of expertise as their own and vying for recognition under the law. For example, in France occupational physicians are the major group required by law to be employed; safety professionals have struggled to achieve strong recognition and occupational hygiene has almost completely failed to establish itself as profession. In each European country we find this diversity of professional groups with differing power and influence and differing boundaries of disciplines and skills which they offer and claim as their own.

The history of occupational OSH has also seen a number of movements which have broadened the canvass of expertise still further. The Loss Control movement in the United States aimed to combine all causes of unintended loss under one heading: process and product damage, theft and security, damage claims and insurance alongside OSH, with a strong emphasis on cost-benefit. The development of the ISO 9000 standard for quality management and its parallel standards for environmental management (ISO 14001) and OSH management (OHSAS 18001) led to efforts to integrate these aspects and appoint experts to advise and manage across all of these areas. The growth of concern about external safety, environmental impact and sustainability led to the appointment of experts in these fields and the combination of these disciplines with OSH in some industries, notably the chemical, nuclear and process industries and later transport.

This diversity both within and between countries has complicated the process of defining and regulating the recognition and work of OSH experts. The need for their expertise is enshrined in article 7 of the European Framework Directive of 1989. However, the detailed interpretation of this article was left to individual member states, though their freedom to fill it in as they wished is curtailed somewhat by the watchful eye of the European court. The court did successfully prosecute the Dutch government over its interpretation of the article, which emphasised external advisory services, rather than experts from the company itself. European law therefore leaves individual countries to fill in the requirement for expert advice based on its own traditions and regulatory and professional history. Each national solution is then subject to the market forces, professional pressures and enforcement and regulatory processes of its own country to keep it functioning effectively. Although there are some national studies now available describing the OSH professions and providing criticism of their role and tasks, there are no comparative studies of effectiveness across different countries, only descriptive comparisons.

Professionalisation

There is, however, another significant force which is not happy to leave such a wide diversity as is described above. That is the professions themselves and their supporting scientific disciplines. Groups of professionals naturally congregate together to exchange their problems and solutions. These mutual support groups develop naturally into professional associations, which soon define their common expertise, develop training courses to educate new entrants to the group, specify codes of professional conduct, strive to set up research to develop their knowledge and aspire to recognition at university level in research and teaching departments. This ushers their subject area into the era of learning and progress, and frees them from detailed, stultifying rule following. OSH has followed this path, in the footsteps of doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants and many others. Professions and particularly scientific disciplines naturally see themselves as universal and look across national boundaries to forge international associations, conferences and working groups. We see this in the occupational health and safety sphere with the ergonomists (IEA), occupational physicians (ICOH) and occupational hygienists (IOHA) and more recently the safety professionals, first under the auspices of the International Social Security Association (ISSA) and more recently that of the European Network of Safety & Health Professional Organisations (ENSHPO). The driving force of these professional bodies is a mixture of altruism, to guarantee the level of expert knowledge and service they provide to society and to place the interest of their clients above their own, tinged with self-interest, to claim certain roles and tasks for their own and deny them to others without the defined knowledge, skills and competence.

Standardisation

This brief sketch of the past provides the starting point for looking into the future, which must work with these strengths and weaknesses. One issue is to resolve the confusion of different professions. What seems to emerge from that is the need for two broadly based and collaborating professions, one directed to prevention of damage, injury and disaster, based in technology, design and management and taking a systems view of its proactive role, and one focussing on protecting and restoring the health of those working in industry, rooted in health sciences and taking an individual or group view. The safety professional and the occupational physician fit these two roles well. Supporting them we can see many much narrower and deeper specialities like health physics, structural reliability, fire engineering, and epidemiology. The place of the occupational hygienist and ergonomist is clearly on the preventive side, but whether as part of the broad profession, or as deeper specialisms is still not resolved. The role of the broad prevention professional is to take an integrated view of how OSH problems arise and what knowledge and skill is needed to resolve them and to help manage organisations in such a way as to optimise OSH performance. Just as general medical practitioners do for health, the safety practitioners call in the services of the deeper specialists for more complex and less frequent problems where deep knowledge is needed. They then integrate that deep knowledge into the broad picture and ensure that it is applicable in practice and does not conflict with other system characteristics.

This is the philosophy which has driven the work of ENSHPO in setting up a standard ( for the qualification of European Occupational Safety & Health Managers (EurOSHM). It is modelled to a degree on the FEANI qualification of European Engineers ( and is designed to define a minimum level of competence for OSH advisors at a policy (strategic and tactical) level in organisations. One aim is to facilitate the movement of such people between European countries by defining a common core of knowledge and skill which will meet the requirements under legislation in all those countries. It also aims to provide a template for countries still developing expert professions in this area, such as some of the recent Eastern European accession countries. Finally it aims to contribute to the development of the profession by providing an agreed definition of its key competences. The standard, which was launched in 2006, will offer registration to professionals by two routes; the main one will be by recognition of national qualification and certification systems meeting the requirements of the standard; the second will be an individual assessment of the criteria for those not covered by an approved national scheme. The essential criteria are:

  • A bachelor’s degree level of general education
  • An OSH training course, validated by an examination, of at least 250 hours, covering the broad spectrum of subject specified in the standard (risk assessment, workplace and process design and technical prevention, safety management, communication and training, organisational change and risk regulation)
  • 2 to 5 years professional experience in OSH jobs
  • Continuous professional development to keep knowledge and skills up to date
  • Adherence to a professional code of conduct
  • Membership of an OSH organisation which is a member of ENSHPO

ENSHPO also plans to develop a sister standard at technician level, to recognise the fact that many European countries have a two-tier system of expertise, with the technician level concentrated more on workplace compliance and technical safety.

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