Foreword

The plain clear message at the centre of this authoritative text is that occupational medicine is preventive medicine practised in the workplace—safeguarding and promoting health and wellbeing among the workforce. Occupational health is now seen as a major aspect of public health. Specialist services have a responsibility both to respond effectively to unforeseen threats to individual and population health arising in the context of working life, and wherever possible to act to prevent work-related ill-health.

Whilst the Handbook is a detailed and comprehensive text for specialists in occupational health it also meets important needs of a much wider readership. The tenets of occupational health are increasingly observed by other health professionals, and by farseeing employers, largely because of evidence that being in work is generally good for health and wellbeing and worklessness is harmful, and also because not being wholly fit is still compatible with work of the right kind.

The Handbook reinforces the view that safeguarding health at work, preventing loss of occupation as a result of ill health, and supporting prompt treatment and rehabilitation to enable people to return to work following absence through illness or injury, are not for occupational health services alone. They are joint enterprises requiring collaboration between employers and occupational health services, the services set up under health and safety legislation, and the NHS.

Issues arising in the practice of occupational health are not limited to specialists in this discipline. They are also the concerns of other people whose advice and actions can influence the balance of understanding between employer and employee, especially when the employee is a patient under the care of other health professionals.

The Handbook is a source of guidance on the occupational significance of many health conditions. This information serves to strengthen clinical management, relieving uncertainty about the implications of illness for working life, and enabling sound advice on the steps to be taken for the best outcome. The Handbook contains information that should be readily accessible to any professional in primary and secondary health care.

At a time marked by an inescapable awareness of serious inequalities in health and life chances, and a climate of economic stringency, we have become familiar with the costs, burdens, and social consequences of impaired health among working age people.

There is widening recognition of the interplay of health with work and of work and the conditions of work with health, and of the many factors that influence health, health beliefs, and behaviour. Often they are deeply embedded in the history and culture of societies. Some can be changed for the better and that is what the practice of a more fully engaged occupation health discipline aims to do. Such engagement requires further changes in culture and in practice, and in the education and training of professionals in health care, and in business and management, necessary to bring about those changes. The Handbook provides a vade mecum in this task.

Professor Dame Carol Black

National Director for Health and Work

June 2012