Overview

Background and Rational:
Background
Worker’s health is an important issue to support productivities of the countries. Only a small proportion of the global workforce has access to occupational health services for primary prevention and control of diseases and injuries caused or aggravated by work. The 60th World Health Assembly endorsed a Global Plan of Action on Workers’ Health for 2008-2017 and urged WHO member states to devise national policies and plans for its implementation. Only one third of countries cover more than 30 percent of their workers with occupational health services. Policy and standard setting ministries lack capacity for enforcement and monitoring. One third of countries has no ministry of health staff dedicated to workers’ health. While most countries have some human resources for health, academic training needs to be scaled up. Although half the countries have national workers’ health profiles with data on occupational diseases, injuries, and legislation, information about communicable and noncommunicable diseases among workers and about lifestyle risks are the least covered topics. Most countries have national institutions carrying out research and training, but the distribution of such entities is uneven across country groups. Awareness about workers’ health problems remains low, both in the media and among the general public. Workers’ health issues feature in policies concerning management of chemicals, emergency preparedness and response, employment strategies, and vocational training. However, workers’ health is seldom considered in policies regarding climate change, trade, economic development, poverty reduction, and general education. Although most countries had some strategies, standards, and targets for coverage of occupational health services, only one third covered more than 30% of their workers with such services. While ministries of health are traditionally strong in legislation, policy and standard setting for occupational health services, in most countries these ministries lacked sufficient capacity to deal with workplace inspection and monitoring of workers’ health trends.

Human resources in occupational medicine and occupational health are limited, ministries of health had no staff dedicated to workers’ health. Most countries had some human resources for occupational health. However, academic training in occupational medicine and occupational health needs to be scaled up at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. As expected, mostly those in the low income group, human resources for occupational medicine and occupational health were not at all sufficient. Several countries reported that occupational health was not included in undergraduate training in medicine (10%), nursing (16%), public health (10%), engineering (19%), and physical science (31%). In those countries where occupational health was included in undergraduate training, this training was usually rated as “insufficient.” Only in the Western Pacific Region were satisfied with the level of inclusion of occupational health in undergraduate training in medicine.

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The proportion of countries with occupational health degree programs in
medicine was highest in the European and American regions and lowest in the South-East Asian and African regions. As country incomes rose, so did the proportion of countries offering such programs. Therefore, several countries particularly, the developing countries need to build up occupational health and occupational medicine practice and that strengthening human resource capacity are a crucial issue.

Conducting postgraduate course Master degree in Occupational Medicine and Occupational Health will fill a gap of lacking human resources particularly occupational physicians, occupational health doctors, some occupational health professions in developing countries.

To conduct this Master program will definitely gain experience for the academic department and faculties as well as the instructors. At the end of the day, the reputation of the country. Following this, our department will be able to apply to be a collaborating center of some international agencies such as WHO.

Division of Occupational Medicine, Department of Community Medicine has incorporated well with various clinical specialties in the faculty and other public health and occupational health professions. There are 8 years of experience in conducting the Master degree in Occupational Medicine and the residency training program in Preventive Medicine (Occupational Medicine). Together with 15 years of experience in running a short course in occupational health and safety management for hospital personnel. The course produced 3059 health workers (from 640 hospitals across Thailand). In addition, in 2002, we hosted the short course in Occupational Epidemiology supported by International Agency Research on Cancer (IARC/WHO, Lyon-France) and there were participants from 5 countries. In 2017, our division hosted the International Conference on Occupational Health for Health Workers, it was organized by Scientific Committee on Occupational Health for Health Worker under International Commission of Occupational Health (ICOH). For the facilities, the faculty is well equipped with classrooms, audiovisuals, telecommunication, e-learning and other learning materials. In addition, the course director has set up and run the office of occupational health and safety for hospital and academic setting for 14 years. The division of Occupational Medicine has worked well with other departments such as the Dept of Medicine, Otolaryngology, Orthopaedics, Surgery, Psychiatry, Toxicology and etc in both medical service, Master program and residency training.

The department has three occupational medicine professions and one occupational health PhD degree together with PhD qualification in public health and epidemiology. Therefor our faculty and department contain several experts to run the Master program in Occupational Medicine and Occupational Health. In addition, such programs like this are very limited around Southeast of Asia and developing countries even middle to upper middle developing countries.