Occupational Health Services Professionals; skills, needs and experiences shared in a learning network : Co-operative inquiry performed in the manufacturing sector

Abstract: Work environment conditions can influence individuals, organisations as well as society, and economic consequences can be extensive. The employer is responsible for the work environment,but must engage Occupational Health Services (OHS) or similar if the own competenceis not sufficient. Consequently, the professional skills of OHS providers is an important topic, as the services delivered are aimed at contributing to a good work environment. However, research in this area was scant and there was a call for illumination of what professional skills are needed within OHS. There was also a need to find arenas for knowledge development and sharing within and between occupational safety and health (OS&H) professionals and researchers.One aim of this thesis was to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding about professional skills when it comes to OS&H engineers and ergonomists working within the manufacturing sector. A second aim was to gain experiences of using co-operative inquiry in a learning network for OS&H professionals in order to develop professional skills. The thesis is based on three papers, all with a qualitative research approach. The co-operative inquiry method was used to run a learning network for the research. This network consisted of ten OS&H professionals (engineers and ergonomists) employed at in-house as well as external providers of OHS for manufacturing companies, and two researchers. Everyone in the network acted as co-researchers in accordance with the intention of co-operative inquiry. The dialogues at the meetings were analysed with thematic analysis, using six socio-technical elements as themes.The results showed that the OS&H engineers and ergonomists in the network wanted to work more preventively in the future. To achieve this, they expressed needs for both theoretically based arguments and communication skills to convince clients about the benefits with this approach. Research based knowledge, practical experience and good examples were shared and reflected on with the purpose of integrating the new knowledge into daily practice. The dialogues at the meetings dealt mainly with topics at an organisation level rather than details and individual level. The dialogues focused on e.g. co-operation in teams within the OHS firms and with different stakeholders at the client companies, integration of OS&H management into existing processes, participation from early stages in design and change processes, the use of risk assessment tools and, finally, communication skills.The co-operative inquiry method was suitable, as the network functioned as an arena for reflective learning.