Occupational medicine has immense benefits to your organization, your employees, as well as to your local economy. As an employer, or business owner, occupational medicine helps to keep your most critical assets, also referred to as your employees, safe and healthy.

What is Occupational Medicine?

Occupational medicine is a branch of medicine that strives to diagnose, treat, and prevent injuries and illnesses that occur within the workplace, or in specific occupations.

Ways Occupational Health and Safety Can Benefit Your Organization

1.     Reduces costs by managing absence

Running your organization without your employees can adversely affect productivity, as well as profits. In addition, when some employees are absent, the morale of colleagues tends to diminish significantly.

With that in mind, the role of occupational medicine providers is to safeguard the welfare of employees by promoting a healthy workplace in order to reduce health related absence.

Through short-term and long-term sickness management, occupational health service providers strive to promptly address illnesses or injuries among employees so that they can go back to work in the shortest time possible.

In other words, occupational medicine helps to reduce the recovery time of sick employees. What’s more, occupational medicine professionals know the importance of returning to work quickly. Although they tend to spend a lot of time diagnosing the illness, they are quick enough to ensure that the employee gets back to work in a timely manner.

Having said that, managing absence has various benefits including:

• Reducing expenses by minimizing the rate of absenteeism
• Increasing staff morale
• Increasing an organization’s productivity and profits
• Minimizing staff turnover
• Improving employees’ perception about absence due to sickness

2.    Promotes employee safety through pre-employment screening

Once an employee has been offered a job within your organization, occupational medicine experts will assess the health of the new employee before he or she can commence employment. The aim of the assessment will be to review the current health and well-being of the new employee.

If the new employee requires additional support in the workplace, the occupational medicine experts will give you guidance and details on what you need to do to help the new employee adjust to his or her  new work environment.

3.    Prevention through health monitoring

Occupational medicine service providers help to ensure that your organization is capable of sustaining high health and safety standards based on your current workplace legislation.

In addition, they will help you identify any possible risks to employees, and will work with your health and safety management team to develop and implement prevention plans, and conduct assessments.

With that being said, below are the benefits of health surveillance: