Occupational Health explored

In my last posting, I concluded that WHO's definition of health can be accepted as an ideal goals that everybody should achieve. The state of complete physical, mental, spiritual and social well being is the state of being in equalibrium. But in reality, health is a continuous responding process of adjustment of the four mentioned human dimensions to the demands of everyday life. These demands arise as a result of the interaction between ourselves with others and our environment. In simple word, we live in the interactive ecology system. So, to preserve our health in the state of complete well being, we cannot act alone. We need a balance interactive of this ecosystem so that it is always in equilibrium states or state of well being. So the responsiblilty to preserve health is beyond individual; it also involves the active role of the family, society and environment. In the nutshell,we need a maintenance of health preservation effort at individual level and also a health protective and promoting system at the family, society and environment level.

The understanding of this concept of health is very important especially when we want to explore occupational health (and also public health). Occupational health is the specific subset of the public health which focus its prevention activity by protecting and promoting health at workplace. The 'workplace' is the domain of occupational heath function. In the 'worker-workplace' ecosystem, workplace is the society and environment components. Since the worker is part of the population, the population as whole and a family as a specific origin of the worker also play a vital role in maintenance the state of well being of the worker.

Workers who come from families of the society in the population, brought with them their health state, belief and behavior to their workplace. At workplace they form an interactive mini ecosystem with the workplace and its environment. This mini ecosystem is a subset of a big ecosystem in the family, society and the population.

In preserving the workers' health, all the components of this mini ecosystem as well as the entire ecocystem have their roles to play. These roles must be integrated.

So the health prevention is an integrated functions which involved the worker, the workplace (the management,peer workers) and the environment (organisation, job task, building ec cetera.).

Health Prevention can be simply defined as stopping or eliminating the factors that can disturb the equilibrium of health. It involved protection and promotion of health at workplace. This is the main 2Ps activities of occupational health.

Health Prevention can be divided into three stages or phases.

1. Primary Prevention 2. Secondary Prevention 3. Tertiary Prevention

to be continued.....