On behalf of 1,750 inspectors, scientists and other professionals in the Health and Safety Executive, Prospect is fearful that a current review of HSE’s Corporate Medical Unit will spell its death knell at a time when the Executive is seeking to shed 250-350 jobs in response to government funding cutbacks.

The unit, formerly the Employment Medical Advisory Service, has dropped from 120 staff in the early 90s – half doctors and half nurses – to the equivalent of seven full-time doctors working as medical inspectors and 25 nursing staff working as occupational health inspectors today.

Prospect warns that if the government is serious about its pledge to tackle work-related ill health, which has a significant detrimental impact on economic competitiveness, urgent action is needed to ensure adequate expertise in occupational health and medicine is available. Allowing the HSE’s medical service to wind-up completely could also breach the government‘s national and international legal obligations.

Steven Kay, chair of Prospect’s HSE branch, said: "The government wants to create workplaces where we both protect the health and well-being of employees and reduce the costs of sickness absence: at the same time they want to enable people to improve their own health and well-being1.’ Yet these good intentions require action to become reality: the levels of activity funded to achieve this border on complacency.

"Not only does the UK lag way behind the rest of Europe in occupational health provision; the parlous state of our occupational medicine facilities means the true size of the problem has been underestimated."

For example, he said, official figures for work-related cancers are based on the now largely discredited 1981 Doll and Peto work which put workplace cancer mortality at 4% of all cancer deaths. More recent estimates (http://www.hazards.org/disease/index.htm) suggest that deaths could be as high as 12% or 18,000 deaths.

Similarly HSE’s own statistics suggest there are around 156,000 people with "breathing or lung problems". However Asthma UK claim as many as 1.75m people have asthma that is made worse by their work. A similar picture exists for other serious conditions including heart disease where work is a contributory factor.

"Effective occupational health saves lives and stops money being wasted. Good occupational health provision by employers requires expert advice from and prevention through professionals employed by the HSE. Simply running down the service to meet short-term cost targets is a false economy that increase illness at work," said Kay.

In its evidence to the HSE review, the union has called for the Corporate Medical Unit to be maintained to undertake a strategic role.

This would include:

• developing standards for occupational health service provision on a generic basis with more specific standards in high-risk industries
• engaging with occupational health specialists to raise awareness and promote standards
• monitoring the provision of occupational health services
• overseeing the standard of provision, and
• contributing to policy formulation in HSE and within the wider government Health, Work and Well-being agenda.

Prospect argues that a workable level of provision for the unit would be a chief medical officer to head the profession, three senior medical inspectors, and two medical inspectors per region of England and Wales, and the same for Scotland, ie 18 overall.

Recognising that this provision would be an end goal, Prospect says the absolute minimum level of interim provision would be one full-time equivalent medical inspector/doctor for each of the seven regions and Scotland in addition to the senior medical inspector posts and the chief officer.

This would be in addition to the small number of specialist posts in the Health and Safety Laboratory and physicians involved in dedicated policy roles.

Summarising Prospect’s argument, Kay concluded, "The small investment we are calling for is a tiny drop compared to the potential gains to the economy that a more focused approach to occupational health would deliver by reducing the billions lost through ill health."

Notes to editors:1 The government’s commitment to occupational ill health was set out in Health, Work and Well-being – Caring for our future. A strategy for the health and well-being of working age people. DWP/DoH/HSE 2005.

The existence of the Corporate Medical Unit also allows the UK to comply with Article nine of the Labour Inspection Convention, while its creation was set up in statute in 1973 and then incorporated as part two of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act.Copies of Prospect evidence are available from Communications on 020 7902 6625 or by emailing [email protected]