The 2016-17 campaign, Healthy Workplaces for All Ages, focused on promoting sustainable work — that is, promoting working conditions that are safe and healthy from the start of a person’s working life, to prevent health problems and enable people to work for longer. This is becoming more and more crucial as Europe’s workforce ages and retirement ages rise.
The campaign attracted record numbers of partners, who actively promoted and disseminated the campaign materials among their extensive networks, and organised and participated in hundreds of good practice exchange and awareness-raising events.
The success and value of this campaign was made clear by the results of an independent evaluation: the topic of the campaign and the tools produced were highly relevant, particularly for organisations and countries with limited resources, the support provided to intermediaries for raising awareness was very effective, and the 2016-17 Good Practice Awards were commended for providing an effective platform for sharing best practices in workplace safety and health management. Other key strengths identified include EU-OSHA’s ability to understand and respond to the needs of its stakeholders and the high quality of its outputs, developed with the needs of its target audiences in mind.
2016-17 campaign video – for All Ages
The ageing workforce presents various challenges for all those involved in
managing OSH:
- Longer working lives may result in longer exposure to risks.
- There will be more workers with chronic health problems and specific needs.
- Older workers might be more vulnerable to certain safety and health hazards.
- The high rate of work-related health problems in certain sectors and jobs that involve a heavy physical and/or mental workload, manual work or
- atypical working hours must be taken into account.
- Disability prevention, rehabilitation and return to work are of increased importance.
- At the society level, age discrimination needs to be dealt with.
