Workplace Safety and Health: Understanding Risks
Item 8: Safety and Health at Work
1. Work and Health
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not just the absence of disease or infirmity. It includes three aspects: physical health, social health, and mental health.
Health, from a multidisciplinary concept: When we discuss the working conditions that may pose a risk factor, we must do so from a holistic perspective.
Working Condition: Any job characteristic that may have a significant influence on the generation of risks to the safety and health of workers. Includes:
- The general characteristics of the premises and facilities.
- Equipment, products, and tools of the workplace.
- The presence, nature, and level of concentration of agents: physical, chemical, biological.
- Procedures for using and handling these agents.
- The organization and management of labor.
- The workload includes requirements of physical and mental, such as repetitive motion, awkward postures, manual handling of loads, work rate, and response time.
- Any other characteristic of the work that creates risks.
The occupational risk is defined as the possibility that a worker suffers harm from a particular work.
2. Possible Damage to Workers’ Health
The Law on Prevention of Occupational Risks considers work-related injury diseases, illnesses, or injuries suffered by reason of or during work.
2.1. Occupational Disease
From a legal standpoint, the Social Security Act defines an occupational disease as one contracted in gainful employment by reason of the activities established in a developed regulatory box.
From a technical standpoint, occupational disease is the gradual deterioration of the health of workers by repeated exposure to unhealthy conditions in the work produced.
2.2. The Accident
From a technical standpoint, an accident is considered any abnormal event, unloved and unwanted, that disrupts the continuity of work, suddenly and unexpectedly, and causes damage to people or things.
From a legal standpoint, the General Law of Social Security defines the accident as any injury suffered by the employee, in connection with or resulting from work.
Elements of this definition:
- It was recognized only to employees. Now it is allowed to self-employed.
- There must be a causal link between work and injury.
- It has to actually produce bodily injury.
Commuting accidents at work: Those suffered by a worker going to or returning from home to the workplace. Case law has clarified this concept by requiring three requirements:
- What happens on the way around the usual address.
- What happens during the usual route.
- That there is no interruption between work and the incident which caused the accident.
The worker suffered displacement by reason of the performance of trade union office.
A worker tasks not specific to their working status.
Accidents at work in the mission are those suffered by a worker on the move towards meeting the job.
Acts of rescue.
Defects or diseases suffered by the worker before they are made worse as a result of an injury caused by an accident.
Intercurrent disease, are the complications of the disease process at or those diseases that have their origin in the new environment which places the patient to cure.
2.3. Other Diseases
Stress, fatigue, premature aging, depression, mobbing or bullying, burnout.