Health-promoting workplaces

Health is a product of interactions between individuals and their environments. While most adults spend a good proportion of their time at the workplaces, the working environment is continuously interacting with the workers in physical, social, and psychological contexts. The World Health Organization views occupational health as dealing with all aspects of health and safety in the workplace and focuses on primary prevention of hazards. The health of the workers is affected by risk factors at the workplace leading to cancers, accidents, musculoskeletal diseases, respiratory diseases, hearing loss, circulatory diseases, stress-related disorders, communicable diseases, and others. Air quality, noise level, lighting, space, facilities, etc. are areas of interest in occupational health and safety. In addition to these structural provisions, social interactions among staff, work ethics, and organisational culture also affect health in workplaces. Health promotion focuses on keeping people healthy to begin with in hopes of preventing them from getting sick. This would be conducive to maintaining workforce productivity. Building of health-promoting workplaces is the duty of everyone, in particular the policymakers, legislators, organisations, employers, employees, health-care professionals, and community health practitioners. These parties can help in building health-promoting workplaces via different means which may include policymaking in promotion of occupational health, provision of physical facilities, employee health programmes, healthy happy workplace initiatives, educational activities, etc. in an interdisciplinary approach.