HOME HEALTH GUIDE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 89, 3 February 1947, Page 8

HOME HEALTH GUIDE

HEALTH IN INDUSTRY

(By the Department of Health)

Overseas, particularly in the States and in England, safe and healthful working--conditions are being more and more insisted on by the workers themselves on the one hand and by large employers and trade organisations on the other. Medicine and big-group industry run factory medical departments that provide first aid on the spot, medical and surgical care as needed, and in addition, check the health of the entire staff, and try to keep them healthy, and the accident rate as low as possible through studying accident prevention. The benefits are so apparent in big industry that industrial hygiene has not only come to stay but is growing in scope year by year. Industries in too small a way to employ works’ doctors or nurses on their own have had no demonstration of the benefits of health supervision with the plant. As the nurse or doctor, or both, go on year after year conducting health overhauls of the staff, gradually the health record improved as compared with other plants within such service. Early cases of tuberculosis are detected before they have had time to infest other workers, diabetes is revealed early, disorders that arise out of the job are quickly diagnosed, whereas they would often puzzle outside physicians. Any heart defects, eye trouble, defective sight or hearing, infected tonsils, decayed teeth—these things are found and the worker encouraged to have treatment or correction early. The result slowly mounts up for the management as the years go by, in less financial loss from sickness an absenteeism by workers. In a controlled survey of workers with periodic health examinations compared with a similar number without, there were definitely fewer major and minor illness in the former and this became more apparent as the years advanced. The dividends in industrial health maintenance take time to appear and be obvious.

That is why small industrial concerns have not become enthusiastic over an industrial health service.

The benefits come from practice. It would pay employers to arrange part-time physician and nursing service where full-time would be impossible.