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Mainstreaming occupational safety and health into university educationE u r o p e a n Ag e n c y f o r Sa f e t y a n d He a l t h a t Wo r kOSH courses involving other engineering disciplines are more likely to be optional.In total seven cases came from engineering. Unsurprisingly, there are also examplesthat involved mining studies. One case and one snapshot covered medicine. Whilethe need to cover OSH in vocational courses in agriculture is well established, it wouldbe interesting to see how OSH is covered in university level studies on agriculture.The snapshot from HSA (OSH authority), Ireland, mentions that they plan to targetagriculture courses Ireland.As has been mentioned, OSH education should cover not only technical safetyissues, but also the place of OSH in integrated management systems and its roleand importance in business management. However few cases were found involvingmainstreaming OSH into business studies. The initiative by the National Safety Councilin the USA came from outside of the university community and was the only casespecifically targeted at business studies. At the Budapest University of Technology andEconomics (BME), Hungary there is a compulsory module on OSH and ergonomicsincluded in the MBA business studies course. Modules from the on-line learningplatform Integral II, Germany have been used in undergraduate lectures for studentsof business administration.This apparent neglect of OSH in business courses was also found in a study publishedby the UK Health and Safety Executive in 2007, cited at the beginning of the UScase. It found that the explicit occupational health and safety content of eight fulltimeMasters of Business Administration (MBA) courses was either non-existentor very limited. The report suggested that the only practicable way to encourageconsideration of OSH in MBA programmes would be the development of high-qualitycase study materials that meet the needs of business schools, which is exactly whatwas done in the case from the USA. Construction, with its high rate of fatalities meansthat the importance of OSH is much more obvious to students and professors of civilengineering, and they are also comfortable with a subject which is often perceivedas being wholly technical in nature. Lack of awareness of risks in the administrativeprofessions, such as work-related stress, and the notion that OSH is a technical subjectmay mean that staff and students from administration sciences are less likely to seeOSH as an issue for them, even though business and administrative decisions andactions can affect the OSH of others.Provision of OSH education by technical facultiesOSH education at universities is mostly organised by technical faculties. Technicalfaculties are more likely to focus on safety issues than occupational health issues,which are more often taught by faculties of medicine, or work organisational issues.However it is important that the focus of OSH is not only on safety and high riskindustries. It could give the impression that OSH is not an important issue in otherareas. If a university does not have a faculty that includes an OSH-related speciality(safety, ergonomics etc.) it is more difficult for them to offer OSH modules withinother courses as they may not have lecturing staff with the necessary competence orinterest readily available.Technical universities in the newer Member StatesThere are several cases from some of the newer Member States such as Estonia,Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary. It appears that OSH is oftenincluded within, for example, engineering courses in their technical universities andthat this is not a new phenomenon. These activities continue, although those in thedepartments providing the OSH education complain of lack of time and resources.150
Mainstreaming occupational safety and health into university educationOn the other hand, the requirement in these Member States to implement new OSHlegislation to comply with the EU OSH directives has provided opportunities for themto further develop their teaching and research work in the OSH area. They are alsointroducing new learning methods, for example, e-learning OSH resources.Practical laboratory workCarrying out practical work in a laboratory is perhaps the most hazardous part ofuniversity activities. While both professors and students usually recognise this, theystill need specific instruction and training in laboratory safety. There is a clear interfacehere between learning about OSH and the university’s responsibility to keep staffand students safe. In the laboratory work, students can see the OSH principles andrequirements for the first time put into practice in their own work. To get the mostout of this instruction, it should not just be a presentation of laboratory rules, butput in the context of learning about risk assessment and prevention so that studentsdevelop a more general awareness and skills related to risk and risk prevention. Thelaboratory safety case from the University of Vienna, Austria, takes this approach andcombines theoretical instruction with practice. The NOP-online/KMR-dangeroussubstances, case from Germany shows how e-learning and an online database cansupport learning and make resources available over across several universities.E u r o p e a n Ag e n c y f o r Sa f e t y a n d He a l t h a t Wo r kActive and practical education methods linked to the real worldLearning should concern the development of skills, attitudes and behaviours as wellas theoretical knowledge. This cannot be achieved through the use of lectures alone.In addition, it is a well-known that practical, ‘active learning’ guarantees far betterlearning results than passive methods such as lectures (see box). This is especially truefor a practical topic such as OSH and previous EU-OSHA reports have emphasised theimportance of ensuring a close link to working life and striking a balance betweentheory and practice (see annex 3).It is, however, a challenge to introduce more practical and participatory learningmethods into university education where large student numbers are involved. It alsorequires more resources from universities and perhaps in some cases, perhaps, a changein mentality by some about how learning at university should take place as well asspecific skills on the part of educators. In universities the easiest educational methodsfor them to implement solutions to implement are lecture-hall teaching combinedwith e-learning. Nevertheless several of the cases demonstrate ways in which a moreactive-learning and participatory approach can be achieved and how a real-life worksituations can be incorporated can be incorporated into their methodology.Visiting and working in real workplaces is an important, effective way to improve thesafety and health awareness of students, which is difficult to replicate in the classroom,even with the use of resources such as videos to take the student out to the real-lifesituation. In the case description from INRS, France, architectural and engineeringstudents design projects together, such as houses. In the case from Belgium, studentsof architecture visit construction sites and observe the work in order to understand thesafety and health requirements of construction work. In the case of DEMI in the NewUniversity of Lisbon in Portugal, students perform risk analysis at real workplaces in orderto learn the correct techniques. The University of Mining and Geology St. Ivan Rilskicooperates with mining companies in order for students to learn safe working methodsin this hazardous industry. The National Safety Council in the USA has developed OSH/business case studies for use on business courses. The educational materials developedfor engineering students at Liverpool University, UK use accident case studies.151
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