[Specificity and standardisation in health surveillance activities]

Specificità e uniformazione nell’attività di sorveglianza sanitaria

Workers' health surveillance has often to cope with fragmented and diversified jobs and with geographically disseminated locations of the units of the same industry performing similar tasks. This represents a major challenge to the occupational health physician. It is quite possible, in fact, that locally different regulations, procedures and resources exist for workers' health protection and workplace safety. Hence, without continuous supervision and effective coordination the way in which health surveillance programs are conducted may sometimes show inhomogeneity even in perfectly similar production units. We report here the experience conducted in a major Italian industrial group with units located in many different part of the country to re-evaluate jobs' content and re-assess risks in the large, complex and multifaceted production fabric of the group, experience that led to a more rational and homogenous activity of the occupational health physicians in defining content, procedures, tools and organization of the workers' health surveillance.