Evaluation of an Educational Program among the Workers Working in Cement Factory in Assiut City for Prevention of Occupational Hazards

Abstract

Occupational health is an important area of health care, which has a major influence on the health status of the entire adult-working population where a large proportion of them spend more than a quarter of their life at work (Rogers, 1994; Twinn et al., 1996 and Radwan, 1999).

The work site is a community with health needs requiring attention to health promotion, prevention of disease and disability and treatment of illness · and injury (Rogers, 1994 and Radwan, 1999).

Occupational health is concerned with two-ways relationship of work and health and it was defined by WHO and ILO, (1991) as "the promotion and maintenance of the highest degree of physical, mental and social well being of workers in all occupations by prevention of- departures from health and controlling risks caused by their working conditions, the protection of workers in their employment from risks resulting from factors adverse to health, the placing and maintenance of the worker in an occupational environment adapted to his physiological and psychological condition". It include the following objectives:

Firstly: to control the work place hazards as (chemical, mechanical, physical, biological and psychosocial hazards). Secondly: to ensure that the physical and mental demands imposed on people at

work by their respective jobs are properly matched with individual, anatomical, physiological and psychological capabilities, needs and limitations. Thirdly: to provide effective measures to protect workers vulnerable to adverse

working conditions.