Organisation of external OSH services in 15 EU Member States  Study conducted by Prevent with the support of Mensura External Service for Prevention and Protection at Work
The growing interest among European authorities for the health and safety of workers and their desire to ensure harmonisation within the different Member States of the European Union, led to the adoption in 1989 of a Directive (89/391/EEC) concerning the implementation of measures designed to encourage improvements in occupational health and safety for workers.
Article 7 stipulates that if the expertise in an enterprise is insuffi cient for handling protection and prevention matters, the employers must call on expertise (people or services) external to the enterprise. It sets out that these external people or services must have appropriate aptitudes as well as the personnel and professional means required. Furthermore there must be a suffi cient number of them to handle the protection and prevention work, taking into account the size of the enterprise and/or establishment, and/or the risks the workers are exposed to, as well as their distribution throughout the entire enterprise and/or establishment.
As a Directive, the regulatory text requires results from Member States, however it leaves it up to each Member State to define the capabilities and aptitudes needed to achieve these objectives.
Subject of the study
The Directive was adopted in 1989 and came into force in 1992. Depending on the country concerned, there was significant impact on prevention organisation in general, more specifi c the impact on protection en prevention services, which is the subject of the study.
How was the Directive received and adopted in the different countries? What changes have been made as part of complying with the Framework Directive? Have the different Member States of the European Union succeeded in having all of their workers covered by prevention services as Europe recommends? What are the skills and capabilities required of people responsible for worker prevention and protection?
Methodology
Two approaches were taken in gathering the information for describing and analysing the different systems of protection and prevention services operating within the 15 Member States of the European Union on 1 May 2004: firstly through a study of literature and Internet sources, and secondly through a survey and interviews.
Five research areas were identified:
- the general framework of prevention organisation; the main legal instruments establishing this framework, the application and the consequences of the 1989 Directive;
- external protection and prevention services; organisation, structure, tasks and missions, principle of multidisciplinarity, financial aspects and quantitative data on the number of external protection and prevention services;
- relationships between the external services and the other actors which are involved in the application of the prevention policy;
- evaluation of the work completed by external services;
- any changes that will affect external services in the near future.
To obtain updated and reliable information, the researchers drew on the cooperation of different contact people belonging to one of the key health and safety organisations in their country. Therefore the collected information allowed us not only to present a comparative picture of the different practices and systems, but also to use the data collected from
internet and in literature in a more optimal manner.
Presentation of the results
The data gathered from the literature analysis and survey was processed and resulted in a detailed report. For each Member State in Europe on 30 June 2005 and where possible using the same approach, this report includes the description of all actors involved in prevention, whether internal or external to the enterprise, the adaptation of the Framework
Directive, the problems encountered as well as the solutions put forward and applied, and fi nally the projects, priorities and changes that are planned for the coming years and that are to be part of a comprehensive development.
Each monograph ends by focusing on the information concerning the external protection and prevention services. All of these analyses were approved and updated on 15 May 2006.
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