• Businesses’ cost of mental health disorders estimated at around €240 billion per year

• Managing work-related stress is the focus of this year’s European Week for Safety and Health at Work

Hundreds of events were held across Europe to mark the start of the 2014 European Week for Safety and Health at Work, a highlight of the Healthy Workplaces Campaign.

Keeping with the current theme – Healthy workplaces manage stress – the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) and its community of partners aimed to get Europe talking about stress and psychosocial risks at the workplace and how they can be tackled together.

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) contributes to making Europe a safer, healthier and more productive place to work. The agency researches, develops and distributes reliable, balanced and impartial safety and health information and organises pan-European awareness-raising campaigns.

Set up by the EU in 1994 and based in Bilbao, Spain, the agency brings together representatives from the European Commission, member state governments and employers’ and workers’ organisations, as well as leading experts in each of the EU member states and beyond.

EU-OSHA director Christa Sedlatschek said: “This is an issue which can have enormous costs for both the health of employees and of businesses. With work-related stress being the second most frequently reported health problem in Europe and with costs to businesses of mental health disorders estimated at around €240 billion per year, this is something we simply cannot afford to ignore. As is evident from the week’s full programme of events, our network across Europe is doing a good job to make sure employers and employees do take notice.”

The EU-OSHA helped its partners in their campaign efforts with the numerous free resources it has made accessible from the campaign website, such as practical tools and the film Napo in … When stress strikes.

The EU-OSHA, in collaboration with the European foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), has also just published a new report ‘Psychosocial risks in Europe – prevalence and strategies for prevention’, which features the experiences of various policies and measures from around Europe. The report draws on the complementary work of the two agencies, which is reflected in their different roles.

Acknowledging the complexity of the relationship between health and work, the report presents comparative information on the prevalence of psychosocial risks among workers and examines the associations between these risks and health and well-being.

It also looks at the extent to which establishments take action to tackle psychosocial risks and describes interventions that can be adopted in companies. An overview of policies in six member states is included.

The push to manage work-related stress and psychosocial risks doesn’t stop with the European Week: November will see the release of an e-guide in all European languages, which gives SMEs advice on how to deal with stress at their workplaces.

In December, the EU-OSHA will also announce a new wave of official campaign partners, and in 2015, the winners of the 12th edition of the European Good Practice Awards will be announced.

The European health and safety agency is represented in Malta by the Occupational Health and Safety Authority.

https://www.healthy-workplaces.eu/en

http://ohsa.org.mt/

About the campaign

Healthy Workplaces Manage Stress is a decentralised campaign open to organisations and individuals at local, national and European levels.

It is coordinated at national level by EU-OSHA’s focal points in more than 30 European countries and supported by official campaign partners – pan-European and multinational organisations – and the campaign media partners.

Throughout 2014 and 2015 EU-OSHA is campaigning to raise awareness of the importance of managing stress and psychosocial risks at the workplace.

Although tackling psychosocial risks and work-related stress may seem challenging, this campaign aims to demonstrate that they can be dealt with in the same logical and systematic way as any other occupational safety and health issue.

With this in mind, the Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2014-2015 has the following key objectives:

• to raise awareness of the growing problem of work-related stress and psychosocial risks;

• to provide and promote the use of simple, practical tools and guidance for managing psychosocial risks and stress in the workplace; and

• to highlight the positive effects of managing psychosocial risks and stress in the workplace, including the business case.

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