Activities of an occupational health organization in Japan, in special reference to services for small- and medium-scale enterprises

This paper reports the activities of occupational health organizations in Japan, taking Nishinihon Occupational Health Service Center, one of the largest scale occupational health service providers, as an example. The organizations, at the request of enterprises, provide occupational health services on a profit basis especially for small- and medium-scale enterprises which lack the human resources and/or facilities to meet legal requirements on occupational health. The main services include: (1) providing various types of medical examinations for workers, (2) measuring work environment, (3) occupational physicians and occupational health nurses providing a comprehensive service. Among these services, legally required health examinations and work environment measurements are well served even for small-scale enterprises. Less effective are the health promotion and occupational health service by the occupational health staffs. In the future, these services will be better provided by a newly developed network system to support occupational heath activities in small-scale enterprises.