Company doctors urged to assume more active role

The Occupational Health and Safety Authority said it was concerned about the incidence of repetitive strain injuries in Malta and was calling for increased awareness on the matter.

Having launched a campaign on musculoskeletal disorders two years ago, the OHSA said it recognised the issue as one where social partnership and participation could alleviate the problem.

Occupational health and safety matters should be a priority to all stakeholders and not only to those who had a legal obligation to safeguard it, the authority said.

A Eurosafe survey on repetitive strain injuries carried out in the clothing industry in Malta, the UK and Italy and released by the General Workers' Union on Monday showed that 83 per cent of local factory sewing machine operators claimed to suffer some sort of pain. Some 70 per cent of respondents said they were resorting to painkillers to cope with their work.

OHSA chief executive officer Mark Gauci said these alarming figures raised a number of queries.

"One needs to question whether it is time for the role of the company doctor to change. Traditionally, company doctors have been recruited for the sole reason of verifying sick leave and to urge workers to go back to the workplace as soon as possible.

"A conscious effort on the part of these doctors to become more aware of occupational health and safety issues and inform the employers accordingly, particularly at an early stage, will help to alleviate some of the problems. This, apart from the legal obligation to notify the OHSA of the occurrence of any disease which may be suspected by the examining physician to be caused by work."

He said that employers should ideally demand to be given feedback by company doctors regarding all OHSA issues following doctors' house visits. Such information would assist an employer when carrying out a risk assessment of the whole operation, the work station design, the work practices involved and the workplace in general.

Dr Gauci said that information obtained from such an exercise would indicate where and when remedial action should be taken and whether production quotas need to be reviewed.

He said there had been anecdotal evidence of different medical practitioners expressing different medical opinions with regard to both the diagnosis and the length of time a sick worker needed to stay at home to recuperate.

These uncertainties create tension and, in the case of workers who were genuinely sick, especially where the disease was caused by the patient's work, an unjust situation which only increases the patient's misery.

He said the Medical Council had issued guidelines on this matter and these, although already available, should perhaps be made more commonly known among the medical profession and especially should serve as the basis for offering redress to those workers who have been treated unfairly and unprofessionally by a medical practitioner.