EuroHealthNet contribution on EU Strategic Framework on Health and Safety at Work
EuroHealthNet welcomed the opportunity to give input for the future Strategic Framework on Health and Safety at Work 2021-2027. EuroHealthNet would like to highlight that it will be critical for the updated strategic framework to adequately address psycho-social factors of health and safety at work, including in increasingly digitalised workplaces, and their distributional impact on various ‘vulnerable’ population groups. Quantitative and qualitative evidence from longitudinal and systematic reviews confirms that physical and mental health are very closely inter-related. Most people spend a very large proportion of their lives at work, therefore workplaces are key settings to safeguard mental health and that doing so and investing in the workplace as health-enhancing settings can generate large returns on productivity, reduce health and social costs. Here, concepts and measures of the Wellbeing Economy should be looked into. The new EU OSH strategy will need to align with a number of other EU initiatives to amplify impacts, notably EU Pact for Skills, EU Digital Targets 2030, work on platform economy, but also with measures supporting the green transition.
The full feedback can be found here.
A joint statement with the EU MH Alliance (The European Alliance for Mental Health, Employment & Work), is available here.
