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Occupational medicine focuses on the intersection of work and health, with specialists working to prevent accidents and diseases resulting from occupational exposure. They may work with individual patients, make recommendations for safety and efficiency in the workplace, and be employed as legislative advisors.
Occupational medicine is a branch of medicine that deals with the intersection of work and health. Many workplaces contain employee hazards, ranging from offices where people can develop repetitive strain injury to high-rise construction projects where people are at risk of serious falls. In fact, occupational health is such a huge concern for many governments that entire government agencies are developed to keep workers safe and healthy, such as the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) in the United States.
Occupational health specialists may work with individual patients who have work-related injuries, helping patients recover and developing plans to help patients avoid injuries in the future. This work may include routine screening of people in risky occupations, patient education to prevent common workplace injuries, and physical exams to determine someone’s level of disability after an occupational injury.
The practice of occupational health also concerns the health and safety of workplaces as a whole. A growing recognition of the need to protect workers led to a number of reforms in the 20th century, including laws targeting hazardous workplaces such as laws requiring people exposed to radiation to wear tags to monitor exposure levels, laws regarding types of conditions in which construction workers may work and the laws specifying working conditions in a variety of environments, from slaughterhouses to spas.
One of the cornerstones of occupational health is the prevention of accidents and diseases resulting from occupational exposure. This may include recommendations for ergonomic workplaces to protect employees, along with laws that address specific workplace hazards such as electrocution, falls, drowning, traffic accidents, crush injuries, shipwrecks, and so on. Many careers are surprisingly risky and occupational health and safety legislation has greatly improved conditions for workers.
In addition to working with patients and in the workplace, making recommendations for safety and efficiency, specialists in this field may also be employed as legislative advisors. They can make recommendations and suggestions for policies designed to promote worker health, and they can also work on end-of-things enforcement, inspecting workplaces, equipment and tools to confirm they meet government standards. In all cases, the aim is to balance the need for industries to do work efficiently with the right of workers to enjoy a reasonably safe working environment and to have protections if they report workplace hazards or are injured in unsafe workplaces.
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