Hello! In the previous class, we conceptualized health promotion, and disease prevention within the logic of intervention in mental health. Now, we are going to look in more detail at some prevention strategies focused on your work context.
Can you think of strategies that could contribute to the prevention of illness among workers in your workplace? In this and the next class, we will talk about three prevention strategies: Occupational Health Surveillance; Mental Health Prevention Programs In Work Organizations; And the dissemination of information on factors of exhaustion. In today's class, we will review the concept of occupational health surveillance.
You might remember this from module three. Basically, health surveillance is an essential function of the SUS, which constitutes a continuous and systematic process of collecting, consolidating, analyzing data, and spreading information about health-related events, aiming at planning and implementing public health measures. Considering the principles of occupational health, which you already saw in module three, and the logic of health surveillance, we can affirm that occupational health surveillance plays a fundamental role in disease prevention and health promotion, mainly through a set of actions aiming at the promotion and prevention of morbidity, mortality, reduction of risks and vulnerability in the working population.
Considering the health issues and their determinants resulting from the development models of productive and work processes. Does it sound complex? Well, basically, occupational health surveillance actions are divided into two work fronts: The epidemiological surveillance of health problems, and the surveillance of work environments and work processes.
Epidemiological surveillance consists of notifying diseases and injuries, and producing health information, so that, with this data and this information, we can think of more appropriate interventions and more effective policies. If we are aware, if we monitor, we produce better health, we produce more effective interventions. Surveillance of work environments and processes consists of inspecting workplaces.
It consists of visiting workplaces to identify risks that are present in that work environment. We will talk more about these two strategies in more detail later on. In the next class, you will see one more of the prevention strategies among the ones that I mentioned right at the beginning of this class.
We will talk about occupational mental health prevention programs in organizations. Until the next class!
