Integrating with the European Agency for health and safety in the work place

Eight Candidate Countries have teamed up with the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work to launch joint occupational safety and health websites.

The launch of the new sites in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia marks a milestone in the implementation of the Agency’s strategy to integrate all 13 EU Candidate Countries into its information network. According to recent European research, 40% of workers in the EU Candidate Countries believe that work is putting their health and safety at risk, compared to less than 30% of their EU counterparts. To tackle these issues, a considerable number of partnership projects between EU Member States and Candidate Countries have been carried out or are underway. And in a new online service also launched today, details of many of these projects can now be found on the Agency’s website at http://europe.osha.eu.int/systems/programmes/

The new Candidate Country sites provide instant access to a wealth of information on a wide range of safety and health issues. As well as linking directly to EU-network information, they also make available at the click of a mouse up-to-date national information on legislation and regulations, good practice solutions to workplace safety problems, research, statistics, training and other fields. The sites follow the structure and presentation of the Agency’s website network familiar to users of the Agency’s established online information network. This already includes the 15 EU Member States, the EFTA countries, the United States, Canada and Australia as well as the International Labour Organization and the World Health Organization.

Hans-Horst Konkolewsky, the Agency’s Director, commented: "With the launch of the new websites these eight Candidate Countries have taken an important step towards offering easily accessible information that allows businesses, workers and experts alike to be better informed about regulatory demands, research and best practices. We’re looking forward to bringing all 13 Candidate Countries online in the coming months. As safety and health conditions in these countries appear to be more problematic than in the EU Member States the transfer and exchange of information especially on practical solutions is crucial if we want to reach our goal to make Europe a safer and healthier place to work "The new sites are all accessible from the Agency’s European network site at http://osha.eu.int/.

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work was set up by the European Union to help meet the information needs in the field of occupational safety and health. Based in Bilbao, Spain, the Agency aims to improve the lives of people at work by stimulating the flow of technical, scientific and economic information between all those involved in occupational safety and health issues.

The Malta web site can be found at: http://mt.osha.eu.int/