Staffing cuts thwart HSE's occupational health aims

Prospect, the union representing health and safety inspectors, has warned that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is too underfunded to operate effectively.

The union fears that a current review of the HSE's Corporate Medical Unit (CMU) will sound its death knell at a time when the organisation is seeking to shed between 250 and 350 jobs in response to government funding cuts.

The unit, formerly called the Employment Medical Advisory Service, employed 120 staff in the early 1990s but now has the equivalent of just seven full-time doctors working as medical inspectors and 25 nursing staff working as occupational health inspectors.

"The government wants to create workplaces where we both protect the health and well-being of employees and reduce the costs of sickness absence," said Steven Kay, chair of Prospect's HSE branch. "Yet these good intentions require action to become reality: the levels of activity funded to achieve this border on complacency."

Prospect wants the CMU to be maintained in a strategic role, arguing that "good occupational health provision by employers requires expert advice from and prevention through professionals employed by the HSE". It says that a workable level of provision would be a chief medical officer, three senior medical inspectors and two medical inspectors for each region of England and Wales, and the same for Scotland.

"Simply running down the service to meet short-term cost targets is a false economy," Kay added.