OCCUPATIONAL-HEALTH PHYSICIANS AND PREVENTION

Occupational medicine has added the promotion and maintenance of employee health to the traditional concerns of safety and workplace exposures. Attention to these areas of health management has been spurred by growing recognition of the adverse impact of preventable or controllable risk factors in health benefit and disability costs and employee productivity. The four major prevention opportunities for occupational physicians are helping to inculcate effective preventive services in health benefit plans, providing cost-effective and health-effective services directly to employees, initiating and coordinating work site health promotion and employee assistance programs, and using results of health surveillance of employees to formulate preventive strategies and to evaluate their effectiveness.