Ergonomics for all ages

For the two-year period of 2016-2017 the Federation of the European Ergonomics Societies (FEES) has decided again to support the annual Healthy Workplaces Campaign of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA).

The theme of this campaign is now “Healthy workplaces for all ages – Promoting a sustainable working life“.
An important sub-field of the campaign deals with adapting the work and the workplace to the workers. This topic is especially interesting for ergonomists, for whom it is a part of their core expertise area. The FEES is also an official partner of the EU-OSHA.

Therefore, the yearly FEES campaign European Month of Ergonomics EME in 2016-2017 is dedicated to this subject, by the topic “Ergonomics for all ages“. The aim of the campaign is to demonstrate the potential of ergonomics to promote a sustainable working life, and thus to promote the collaboration between ergonomists and occupational health and safety experts to work together for this subject.
The EU-OSHA campaign “Healthy Workplaces for all ages” aims at recognizing and managing the challenges of an ageing workforce. The focus is not only on aging workforce but on the workers of all ages, highlighting the importance of a life-course approach. Fostering healthy work practices in young workers and developing good working conditions promotes sustainable work throughout their working lives and ensures healthy aging. For more information, see www.healthy-workplaces.eu.

The EU-OSHA campaign covers this topic on the whole, emphasizing OHS management issues relating sustainable work and healthy aging, such as leadership and participation, diversity-sensitive risk assessment, adapting the workplace to the workers, disability prevention and rehabilitation, cooperation with human resources (HR) management, workplace health promotion, lifelong learning, etc. The FEES campaign will, for ergonomists’ part, draw a special attention to ergonomics considerations, like adapting the workplace and work activity to the capabilities of the workers.

The basic reason for work-related health problems lies in poor working conditions, which can most often be attributed to poor ergonomic design. By good ergonomic design the long-term preconditions for safe and healthy work can be created. On the other hand, if ergonomics is forgotten in the design of the workplace it may be difficult, costly or even impossible to achieve good working conditions later by corrective measures. In poor working conditions it is difficult for the OHS personnel to maintain healthy and safe work. Ergonomic design of the work and workplace is one of the keys to a sustainable working life.

The FEES campaign EME 2016-2017 “Ergonomics for all ages” can follow the general scheme of the earlier campaigns, starting from the introduction and continuing to a more practical level, e.g. to presentation of cases or methods and discussion of experiences at the national level. In the realization of the campaign the active involvement of the national ergonomics societies is essential, for example by organizing seminars or other events, by distribution of material, and, by gathering and distribution of experiences.
Thanks to Martti Launis an introductory power point presentation for the EME 2016-2017 campaign “Ergonomics for all ages” is now published.

In order to develop the future EME campaigns, and to share the experiences within the national societies, we kindly ask all interested parties to gather experiences on the coming EME campaigns in 2016 and 2017 (e.g. information concerning the realized events, the cooperation with other organisations, other initiatives, articles, other useful documents, etc.). This information or material can be sent to the Communication and Promotion Committee of the FEES to info@ergonomics-fees.eu

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