Employee health and safety management in home nursing a practical report

摘要

Since 1995 Austrian social service enterprises have been obliged by the Employee Health and Safety Act to carry out several responsibilities. The Employee Health and Safety Act, based on European Union guidelines, not only requires these organisations to maintain technical norms, but the organisations have also been obliged to appoint functionaries and to instruct employees as well as to carry out inspections (evaluation) of the working conditions present in their operations. Finally documentation in accordance with regulations are to be kept. However, social service enterprises are confronted with the problem that this law was developed primarily to meet the standards of conventional accident prevention in industry and commerce. Although approximately 8,5% (OSTAT 1997, p.114) of the employees in Austria work in the health and social service sectors, the diverse stresses associated with these services (Bronneberg 1997), namely in the areas of geriatric care or nursing, are only dealt with on the fringes of the law. This means that significant segments of the "service society" labour market play only a secondary role in the employee health and safety regulations. As a result of these circumstances, the Institute for Vocational and Adult Educational Research at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz (the department of work design), in co-operation with the Volkshilfe (a large enterprise in the area of health- and social-service) in Upper Austria, was commissioned by the Upper Austrian Provincial Government to carry out the model project "Health and Safety Management". The objective of this project was to effectively implement employee health and safety regulations in the field of home nursing. A further objective was to make transferable experiences accessible in the form of a handbook.