A NEW TRAINING SPECIFICATION FOR WORKPLACE HEALTH PROMOTION

The field of workplace health promotion has seen developments of conce pts, practice and interest in recent years. However, recent EC wide re search has pointed to problems which constrain its development. These include a lack of awareness amongst the major players who are in a pos ition to implement workplace health promotion, difficulties in transmi tting the concept of and organising genuine inter-disciplinary approac hes to workplace health promotion, and a lack of training courses in t he area. This paper describes a project to develop a training specific ation for workplace health promotion targeted at a range of profession al and non-professional groups, These include occupational physicians and nurses, safety engineers, personnel managers, health and safety re presentatives and others. The project has developed a modular training specification - each trainee group can undertake all modules to an ap propriate level of detail. It focuses on two broad areas - the health promotion process and the roles necessary to support that process. The first area defines an idealised health promotion process, which has b een divided into 7 phases, while the second area outlines 6 principal roles in relation to interacting with that process. Future work will s ee the implementation of the training specification in a number of tes t sites.