Need and Expectation of Provincial Health Officers Responsible in Occupational Health, Safety and Environmental Diseases

Abstract

The objectives of this study was to investigate the requirement and the expectation from occupational health and environmental of Bureau of Occupational and Environmental Diseases compared with qualitative data collect from the in- depth interview and group discussion. The study was designed in a mixed model which included quantitation (using questionnaire) and qualitation (using in- depth interview, group discussion and literature review). The occupational health officers in the province were sampled since June-September, 2008. About 54.4% questionnaires were completed and analyzed. We found that most of the samples were governmental officers, secondly public health officers. Most of them had been working in the selected province for more than 20 years, knowing occupational health for more than 10 years and knowing the Bureau of Occupational and Environmental Diseases more than 3-5 years. They all agreed that occupational health was needed in the higher level in setting up the strategies between the provinces since a lot of people who worked in the related field got accidents and had faced risk from their works and the environments. Furthermore, most of them worked in diseases control group, develops technical group, technical support group, protect a consumer group, environmental health group, non communicable diseases group environmental health and occupational health group, sanitation and environmental health group respectively. The problems in the process for occupational health were listed as lack of human resource included skill and experience, lack of the policies those support occupational health work, inadequacy of the fund, need more knowledge and insight in risk management, health managements and operating procedures, lack of standardized index thus there was no proper evaluation, lack of co-operation and network between the central units and the others such as Medical engineering center, Occupational safety center, lack of the related data, especially, database since the alteration in the data collection for report 506. The requirements and expectation for the future are human resource developments by funding for the training and supporting the related curriculum and speakers, precaution: promotion the knowledge in the occupational safety and environmental for the officers, data base, public relation, supporting team , control and project the plan for the investigation. Regarding to the comparisons between the requirements and the expectations from target groups, we found that there was a few differences in each provinces in the needs of the equipments, suppliers and fund.