Baltic Sea Network on Occupational Health and Safety
Fourth Workshop for Coordinators
20- 21 September 1999, Helsinki, Finland
Introduction
The meeting was the fourth meeting for the coordinators of the Baltic Sea Network on Occupational Health and Safety project. The contact persons from six countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden participated, in addition to the members of the Finnish planning group of the project.
The programme of the meeting is in Annex 1, and the list of participants in Annex 2.
Suvi Lehtinen, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, opened the meeting and wished the participants welcome. She pointed out that the next WHO/EURO meeting to be held in Berlin is drawing near and the group could consider a situation analysis and a review of future tasks and activities of the network for the meeting. Secondly, she wished that the network would take account of the information material collected for Bilbao network and make use of those information sources in order not to duplicate any work done.
Status Report of the Project
Anneli Vartio, FIOH, gave an overview about the current situation of the project. Denmark just opened its pages in September, and Norway has informed that they plan to open their pages by the end of September. As a result, all ten countries will have pages opened quite soon.
The network project was promoted by two presentations at the Nordic Meeting of Work Environment, held in Sweden in August 1999: a poster by Anneli Vartio presented the project in general, and an oral presentation by Bo Dahlner introduced the Swedish participation in the project. A third opportunity for promotion will come in November 1999, when Miikka Rantanen will have a poster presentation at the International Symposium Occupational Health for Europeans, to be held in Helsinki.
An application for funding was made to the Nordic Council of Ministers in August but it was rejected. The application will still be handled by the Fund for Collaboration with the Neighbouring Regions of the Nordic Council of Ministers.
The main page of the Network is to be updated and a set of transparencies for the introductive purposes is under work. A search system has been developed to search information from the whole content of the Network.
Country Reports
Estonia
The Occupational Health and Safety Act was enforced on 26.7.1999 and it can be found in the network. Also 12 regulations based on the Act are listed on the pages.
The heading News and activities includes information about the First Occupational Health Day in Estonia, held on 15.9. The programme of the meeting and statistics about the participants (total 433) are available. It was noted that the list of participants with their contact information will be very useful also for future purposes.
Especially the national (Estonian language) pages has been developed since the last coordinators' meeting. The web-pages of the Association of the Occupational Diseases Patients has been linked, as well as the web-pages of the Occupational Health Centre.
Training information in Estonian contains a list of training centres with contact persons. The training curricula in occupational medicine are developed according to the Draft report by Ewan B. Macdonald, University of Glasgow, entitled Occupational Medicine in Europe, Evolution of the Profession. The report was circulated among the participants.
The heading Other information includes the Estonian-Norwegian questionnaire form on Working Conditions in the Baltic countries, which will be implemented in Estonia.
Latvia
The Baltic Sea Network was presented in the Conference of Latvian Occupational Physicians (190 participants). A meeting with national organizations was held, and organizational profiles of national organizations (total 12- 15) are due in the end of September (Ministry of Welfare, State Labor Inspection, etc.). BSN will be mentioned on the new web-pages of the Ministry of Welfare as an "important project ongoing in Latvia".
The Latvian language pages of the Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health are 90% ready. Updates and additions are made on contact information (fully revised), information by subject area, legislation (full list of occupational diseases in Latvian) statistics (e.g. accidents in 1998 and occupational diseases of first 6 months in 1999); organizational profiles (IOEH in Latvian).
Plans for the autumn 1999 include the completing of collecting the organizational profiles, and a complete list of legislation in Latvian and English with links to full texts.
The Baltic Sea Network has contributed to the overall development of OHS in Latvia: information on courses and seminars, and other events are available on the pages and legal acts are easily available as well. Modern web-technologies are developed within the project activities.
The number of occupational physicians and other specialists is increasing rapidly (105 occupational physicians and 30 occupational nurses trained in 1998; Latvian Association of Occupational Physicians now has 187 members). Increased knowledge on OHS helps significantly in diagnostics of occupational diseases, resulting in higher figures in the number of occupational diseases ( in 1998: 215; six first months in 1999: already 194).
Lithuania
New pages have been created mainly on Lithuanian language. Legislation now includes three laws; in last March a new law on Occupational Health Services came into force and it will be officially translated into English in the near future. Statistics include occupational diseases in 1999 in Lithuanian language.
In English pages the organizational profiles and statistics have been updated. A feedback form has been created as well as a search system functioning in the Lithuanian country pages.
Plans for the near future include the description of structure and organization of occupational health and safety system, and description of OH & S programmes, training courses, main events and contact persons with email addresses.
The group discussed about the possibilities of standardization between countries regarding statistics, for example. Several concepts and definitions differ slightly or significantly between countries and different data collection criteria are used. The importance of definitions and criteria were stressed and the criteria should always be revealed, but the comparison of individual figures is still very difficult and should be done with care.
Poland
The obituary of the former Director of the Lodz Institute, Janusz Indulski, has been put into the network. The web-pages of the five important institutions in Poland have been linked to the network under organizational profiles. Two of them have only Polish pages. Links are also formed to the pages of the Polish Association of Occupational Physicians and Polish Association of Industrial Hygienists.
OH & S Information sources contain publication lists and contact information of occupational health centres and regional sanitary inspectorates according to an administrative division in Poland (16 regions). The Polish OH & S system has two actors: Labour Inspectorate is working under the parlament. Its task is to control the fulfilment of the labor code in enterprises. The Sanitary Inspectorate is working under the ministry and responsible for sanitary control, e.g. exposures, hazardous conditions, etc. at workplaces.
Legislation includes a list of major legal acts related to OH & S. Occupational health services Act has an outline and full text in English. Note: on the contrary to the report of the Third Coordinators' Meeting (page 2) the list of occupational diseases is official but the translation into English is unofficial.
There are several training courses listed under the pages of the organizing institutions e.g. the Lodz Institute.
Russia
A new national planning group for the network project has been formed recently with the vice rector of education, Professor Sherbo, and Dr Milutka from the Department of Occupational Medicine as experts of the network content.
The layout of the Medical Academy web-site has changed. The contact info has been changed to be the same style as other countries have in the network. Information has been feeded to the Subject Area section. The organizational profiles are going to be prepared in the near future. Mr Loukachenkov and Mr Krisciukaitis from Lithuania are going to have a presentation about the Baltic Sea Network at a telemedicine conference in Sweden in the end of September.
Sweden
Some information has been feeded under every submenu heading. The News and Activities section has a summary about the BSN-presentations at the Nordic Meeting of Work Environment. The Swedish reference group will have their meeting in the beginning of November and the creating of the pages will be planned further.
Training and legislation was shortly introduced. Some legislation is currently under translation. Statistical information is given under information sources where there is a link to the pages of the national board of occupational safety and health.
Networking experiences - concepts, visions, development needs
Kari Kurppa, FIOH
The following steps has been taken in the building up of the Baltic Sea Network: communication (the capabilities have been created); Information retrieval (internet search, downloading etc.); National information collection (going on at the moment; e.g. organizational profiles); Information presentation (technical problems solved quite competently); Collaboration (regional collaboration succesful, further collaboration developed according to mutual interest).
The FIOH project about gathering the regional development activities was shortly described (an example of a project description, see Annex 3). It is obvious that the network should be well aware of all the activities and projects going on in the region to be able to avoid duplicate work and to profit the results of these activities. This concerns also the forthcoming twinning projects.
In the regional collaboration it would be useful to identify such items/subjects useful to all and put a common effort to develop these items. The national collaboration and network is often much more difficult to build than the regional network.
As a concept, a network is a structure, not an activity itself. It is a platform for collaboration which is an activity and purpose for the network at the same time. Psychologically, networking requires new attitudes towards the openness of information and making information transparent.
The concept of new organization (by Hastings 1993) was introduced and the traditional and new organization cultures were compared to each other (see Annex 4; the copies of the transparencies of the presentation).
Group works: topics of mutual interest for collaboration between countries
Chair: Kari Kurppa, FIOH
The following task was given to the participants:
List topics/subject areas that could benefit from a collaborative approach of several organizations on the a) regional level (BSN); b) national level. Give examples of obstacles for collaboration (e.g. when building a national network). Propose solutions to such obstacles.
Two groups were formed:
I. Eglite, Krisciukaitis, Loukachenkov, Rünkla, Wojda
II. Dahlner, Jankauskas, Jänes, Michalak, Vanadzins
The result of the group works is described in Annex 5.
The group discussed about the estimation of the costs of occupational hazards and accidents. The health insurance system may show it partially and workplace absenteeism may be one estimate. To put some effort to prevention of hazards will pay itself back within some time.
There should be focused, practical, and easily understandable targets for the information contents in the network. Activation and mobilization of interorganizational collaboration within countries is needed.
Technical structure of the www-pages; development needs and standards
Miikka Rantanen, FIOH
The BSN has a distributed architecture, i.e. every country has their information on their own server, and the servers are connected to each other. The network functions on three levels: main page (updated by the FIOH), country page (country level), and national pages (national language). The menu of the country homepage was described with Finnish country pages as an example.
The meaning of the various categories was discussed, e.g. background information could contain general statistics, political, economic, geographical, etc. information of the country. It was suggested that it could contain also wide descriptions concerning the field of OH & S in a country (such as a broad description of the occupational health services). OH & S information sources could contain contact information about information centres, libraries, and other facilities which provide information on OH & S. Information by Subject Area could contain links only to national sources.
Recent updates from the technical point of view:
· Search engine on the regional level is working
· Denmark has opened country homepage
· The database of regional development activities has been developed further
Development needs at the moment:
· Navigation - the importance of proper navigation is growing when more information is feeded to the pages
· Seach system should be developed also on country level
· Feedback possibility will be built
· Page templates
· Usability issues in general
· Promotion of the network
Discussion
It was pointed out that the database of the development activities, when opened, would be linked both to the regional and country level of the network. The questionnary used for collecting the information at the FIOH could be used as a structural model when collecting similar information in other countries.
Broad description of the occupational health services system was deemed to be important to have from every country.
As to the structure of information it was noticed that different type of users should be taken into account. Condenced summaries are very useful for some users whereas others would prefer full texts. It was recommended to create condenced summaries from long documents.
The group discussed about the possibility to start to build a national OH & S web-network. This would require that the focal points in every country would develop a system to link different national locations and domestic institutes (e.g. universities) to each other. Training and assisting the experts of the national institutions to create and maintain their own homepages would be required as well. It was noted, however, that not in every country there exists enough interest for such an effort. Thus, time may be needed for raising interest within a certain country. This kind of project when implemented in every country could be a subject of financing e.g. from the EU. It was agreed that the BSN project will start to explore these possibilities as a whole.
Training needs assessment
Chairs: Bo Dahlner, NIWL and Olli Punnonen, FIOH
Bo Dahlner introduced shortly the plan of collecting information with a questionnary about training in OHS in BSN-countries.