Occupational Health Nursing: Promoting Worker Safety & Health, Summaries of Community Health

Download Occupational Health Nursing: Promoting Worker Safety & Health and more Summaries Community Health in PDF only on Docsity! CHN INTRODUCTION Article 23 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "Every- one has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work". The government, being tasked to uphold the rights of its people, must then gather the various expertise of its members to enable itself to promote occupational safety and health (OSH), including that of public health nurses. In the Philippines, the lead government agency on OSH is the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). It has been given rule-making and rule-enforcement powers to implement stipulations of the Philippine Constitution and the Philippine Labor Code. Through its Occupational Safety and Health Center (OSHC), it produced the National Profile on Occupational Safety and Health of the Philippines that defined OSH as a discipline involved in, "the promotion and maintenance of the highest degree of physical, mental and social well-being of workers in all occupations”. The union of public health nurses to the thrust of the government for OSH gave rise to a public health nursing subspecialty called occupational health nursing. This has been defined by the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses (AAOHN) as the following: The specialty practice that focuses on the promotion, prevention, and restoration of health within the context of a safe and healthy environment. It includes the prevention of adverse health effects from occupational and environmental hazards. It provides for and delivers occupational and environmental health and safety programs and services to clients. Occupational health nursing derives its theoretical, conceptual, and factual framework from a multidisciplinary base. Elements of this multidisciplinary base include the following (Rogers, 1998, 2003b): ¢ Nursing science - to provide the context for health care delivery and recognize the needs of individuals, groups, and populations within the framework of prevention, health promotion, and illness and injury care management, including risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication. ¢ (BGANSENES - specific to treatment and management of occupational health illness and injury, integrated with nursing health surveillance activities. ° Occupational health sciences - including toxicology, to recognize routes of exposure, examine relationships between chemical H exposures in the workplace and acute and latent health effects such as burns or cancer, and understand dose-response P relationships; industrial hygiene, V identify and evaluate workplace hazards ( so that control mechanisms can be implemented for exposure reduction; safety, to identify and control workplace injuries through active safeguards and N worker training and education programs f about job safety; and ergonomics, to match the job to the worker, emphasizing capabilities and minimizing limitations. ¢ Epideémiology - to study health and illness trends and characteristics of the worker population, investigate work-related illness and injury episodes, and apply epidemiological methods to analyze and interpret risk data to determine causal relationships and participate in epidemiological research. « BUSESSYANENSCONORIGMNBORGSMCONCEPISMANINGHAGIBIES - for strategic and operational planning, for valuing quality and cost-effective services, and for management of occupational health and safety programs.