21 November 2004 - New Research Report by HSE on Combined Effects of Occupational Health Hazards
The new Health and Safety Executive (HSE) report on combined effects of occupational health hazards has been published, in order to combine the white collar stressors and blue collar stressors previously only looked at as individual areas for health hazards within the workplace.
It was noted by the HSE that white collar stressors had mainly psychosocial environmental hazards, such as, psychology of individual and social environment exposure, whereas the blue collar stressors had exposure to stresses of a physical nature, such as noise, fumes and longer hours of work.
The research looked at five main areas as follows:
- To review the current literature on the combined effects of occupational hazards on health and safety;
- Conduct secondary analyses of self-report data from randomly selected community samples to examine the impact of combinations of workplace factors on health and safety
- To investigate the effects of combinations of workplace factors on accidents at work in a sample attending Accident and Emergency units in Wales.
- To investigate using measures taken before and after work at the start and end of the working week and effects of combinations of workplace factors on performance efficiency and physiology. To assess the utility of the approach to other current topics of interest and review the implications of the results for policy issues such as stress management standards.
The full report can be accessed by clicking the following: RR287 - Combined effects of occupational health hazards
Article by Alexandra Johnston
