ICOH members of WHO Collaborating Centres Network Planning Committee

Short report by Bengt Knave

Fifth Network Meeting of WHO Collaborating Centresin Occupational Health, Changmai, Thailand, November 13-15 2001.

The WHO Collaborating Centres (CCs) in Occupational Health meet regularly to update each other on on-going activities, and also to plan for new projects of common interest. Recent meetings took place in Bogota 1997, Helsinki 1999, and now in Changmai 2001. There are more than 50 members of the Network, and this time 40 members participated in the meeting. ICOH, IOHA and IEA – as NGOs - were invited to the meeting, and also to participate in different projects.

The Meeting agreed on a Network Work plan for 2002 – 2005 including the following topics:

• Intensive partnership in Africa
• Child labour
• Silicosis elimination
• Practical solutions at the workplace
• Health care workers
• Health promotion (including tobacco free workplaces)
• Promotion of OSH in SMEs and the informal sector
• Prevention of musculoskeletal disorders
• Prevention technology
• Training and education programmes

In several of these activities relevant ICOH SCs and programmes will be invited to participate. It was also decided that ICOH will be one of the members of the WHO CCs Network Planning Committee.

In my own ICOH presentation I referred to the concern among ICOH Board members as to the absence of occupational health in the WHO general strategy, as announced by the WHO Director-General at the World Health Assembly – and also on other occasions this year in Geneva. Dr Mike Repacholi, WHO HQ Occupational Health unit, declared in his speech that his unit was preparing a statement from this meeting to the WH Assembly 2002, in which the importance of healthy workers in the campaign against world poverty and vulnerability would be pointed out.

To conclude, an interesting and well performed meeting, many results of which will be presented at the next WHO CCs Network meeting – in Iguassu, Brazil February 2003.

Bengt Knave