Assess and develop occupational health collaboration

Evaluate successes and development needs

Assess the results and effectiveness of occupational health collaboration together with the occupational health team. Your role is to bring to the table your experiences, insights, results and statistics that you will work on together with the occupational health team. You can use the monitoring of occupational diseases and accidents and absences due to illness, pension expenditure and the forecast thereof. If necessary, you can invite representatives of your insurance companies, such as your pension or accident insurance company, to the discussion and assessment session. 

Assess the results achieved together with the occupational health services in relation to the set targets. Review at least the following questions: 

• Have work-related illnesses and accidents decreased? 
• Has the healthiness and safety of the work and the work environment increased and has the functionality of work community’s improved?
• Have employees’ health and ability to work and function improved?  

Also monitor the costs and the resources needed. Assess the success of the collaboration, i.e. the division of efforts and activities between the workplace and occupational health services. That allows you to better target and develop the activities and to update the action plan.

In a small company, the activities should be assessed once a year, and in larger companies even more often.

Measure the results of occupational health collaboration

You get what you measure, as the old adage goes. So measure what you wish to achieve. If you choose to measure the number of occupational health negotiations, they are likely to increase. However, if the original target was to increase the number of successful returns to work from long sick leave, then measure that.

It is easy to set numerical indicators for some areas, such as absences due to illness, occupational accidents and pension expenditure. Other targets can be monitored through action. The target can be, for example, fixing a problem detected during a workplace visit or implementing an agreed measure. Examples of possible targets:

• Now everyone wears protective equipment at our worksite, compared to only 40 per cent six months ago.
• All our supervisors have been trained to use the early support model. 
• Our statutory exposure based health examinations are now up to date.

Even more important than the indicators is that you monitor, together with the occupational health services, how you have made progress in your shared targets. Agree, already when planning the activities, when and how you will review the targets. At the same time, you can make course corrections and write them down in the plan.

Assessing the action plan improves the quality of planning

Look over the action plan with a critical eye. You may have discussed many good targets and useful aspects. Make sure they are clearly documented in the action plan. Is the plan concrete and understandable?

Look at the following aspects when assessing the appropriateness and clarity of the action plan.

• How have your company’s main characteristics been described?  
• Is the action plan based on, among other things, the conclusions drawn up in the workplace survey?  
• Is the action plan based on documented challenges?  
• Have the targets been documented so that you can monitor and measure them?  
• Are the activities credible in relation to the targets?  
• Are the resources sufficient in relation to the activities?  
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Based on the monitoring and assessment of the activities, you will develop and update the action plan together with the occupational health services.