Baltic Sea Network on Occupational Health and Safety Second Workshop for Coordinators

10-11 September 1998, Helsinki, Finland

Introduction

The meeting was the second meeting for the coordinators of the Baltic Sea Network on Occupational Health and Safety project. The contact persons from five countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Russia, were invited to participate. In addition the planning group of the project from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FIOH) participated in the meeting.

The programme of the meeting is in annex 1, and the list of participants in annex 2.

Ms Suvi Lehtinen, Chief of Office of Information and International Affairs at the FIOH, opened the meeting and wished the participants welcome.

Country reports

The Estonian focal point for the Baltic Sea Network project is the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Department of Working Environment. The contents of the Estonian homepage have been planned and some material has already been prepared (the list of the planned contents is in annex 3). The pages will be soon linked to the www-pages.

The English version of the homepage of the Latvian focal point, the Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health (IOEH), was published in January 1998. The pages already contain information on the IOEH, background information on Latvia, and contact information of Latvian institutions in the field of OH & S.

The Latvian language version of the homepage of the IOEH is going to be published in October 1998. Latvian Network members are planning to meet in November 1998 for making a collective agreement on purposes, participants and responsibilities concerning the national Network as well as on the organizational profiles of the institutes. In January 1999 the construction of the English pages will continue.

The technical problems which disturbed the progress of the project in the beginning have been solved and the work of creating pages and feeding information material is proceeding well at the focal point, the Centre of Occupational Medicine (COM), Ministry of Health. The homepage of the COM includes e.g. information about the statistics on occupational diseases. In addition, the Lithuanian pages contain the organizational profile of the focal point, background information, contact information on institutions in the field of OH & S, and legislation.

Poland

In Poland there are much information material which could be feeded into the Network, e.g. information about the focal point, Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine, legal acts, lists of harmful factors etc. The problem is the selection of the most relevant material. The main institutes in the field of OH & S have their own homepages in Polish which could be linked to the Baltic Sea Network.

The pages contain the presentation of the focal point, St. Petersburg Medical Academy of Postgraduate Studies (MAPS). Some items, which could form a start for "substance areas" have been created under the title "original materials". The specialists of the MAPS are providing information to the Network. The focal point is planning to create connections to other institutions in the field of OH & S in the region. A lot of information is in Russian. Some technical problems still exist, and the lack of resources hinder the training of the specialists to use computers for feeding the information into the www-pages.

As an introduction to the group work, Dr Kari Kurppa, FIOH, gave an overview about the purposes and the present situation of the Baltic Sea Network.

The three purposes for the Baltic Sea Network are:

1. Provision of technical platform for international communication and information retrieval
2. Electronic repository of international and national information
3. Framework for collaboration

As to the sustainability of the Network the following remarks were made:

• technical stability has been reached for communication and information retrieval
• network identity has been created with a common main homepage and standardized country homepages which are similar in all participating countries
• some useful information has been put into the Network

Every country has responsibility on their own homepages. The updating of the main homepage will be made by the project coordinators at the FIOH.

Potential participants for the national networks are:

1. Core organizations with major responsibilities or activities - most relevant ministries, employers organizations and trade unions should be invited first
2. Organizations with limited responsibilities or activities
   - other relevant ministeries, universities, research institutions, scientific and professional associations
3. Interest groups (patients associations, media, etc.)

The following task was given to the working groups:

1. Prepare a step-by-step plan for producing a national directory of organizations, agencies and institutions that have responsibilities, capacities or interests in occupational health and safety.

For each step: what needs to be considered/done; who would be responsible; time requirements for each step; identify any problem/difficulty for implementing the step, and propose a solution to overcome the problem. Consider that the plan is going to be implemented in your country.

Two working groups were formed:
1. Jänes (Estonia), Eglite (Latvia), Krisciukaitis (Lithuania), Kisselev (Russia)
2. Pruul (Estonia), Vanadzins (Latvia), Jankauskas (Lithuania), Michalak (Poland), Lukachenkov (Russia)

The groups identified the following steps to be done:

1. Identifying and listing of relevant organizations at the national level, full coverage not required for the draft directory
2. Preparing a cover letter to be sent to the organizations that are to be included in the directory
3. Preparing a questionnaire on the "organizational profile" (contact info, responsibilities, capacities) (a model has been provided)
4. Sending the cover letter and the questionnaires, collecting information
5. Organizing the profiles to a directory (examples provided from Asian countries)
6. Paper prints (word-processor) of the national draft directory
7. A paper print copy to be sent to all national focal points
8. A www-version of the directory
9. Maintenance of the directory

As a conclusion for the group work it was stated that:

• adding the responsibility areas to the contact list of institutions, which already exists in most countries, is a good starting point (this contact list with institutional responsibilities should be immediately incorporated to the www).
• it is better to start with collecting more informative organizational profiles about 3-4 most important institutions first
• motivation of the national institutions to collaborate is an important factor
• secretarial responsibility and coordination is at the focal points, responsibility for correct institutional information remains at the source.

Planning for future substance areas to the network

The group discussed about, what kind of information material should be available in the Network and what would be most interesting for the users like experts and administrators(see examples in annex 4).

Several substance areas came up; e.g. seafarers' occupational health and safety and good occupational health practice. Agriculture was identified as one important area as well.

A list of suggested interest and substance areas was introduced in the concluding session of the workshop, see page 5 (Suggestions for future activities 1998-1999).

Ms Irja Laamanen, Director of the Information Service Centre of the FIOH gave a short introduction to the principles of copyright. The copyright is a form of protection provided by the law to the authors of the "original works of authorship", including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and certain other works. The protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Commercial distribution and copying is illegal without the permission of the copyright owner. To copy for personal study and review is acceptable.

The copyright rules should be followed in the same way in www as they are followed in printed documents. Linking of information is allowed as long as it is clearly showed that the material in the other end of the link belongs to another source.

Sources for copyright information can be found in the following addresses:

http://www.imprimatur.alcs.co.uk/international copyright agreements
http://www.csusa.org/research/intl.html
http://www.patents.com/weblaw.sht
http://www.kaapeli.fi/~eblida/ecup/ecupinfo.html
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html#wci

Vancouver list of references

Ms Suvi Lehtinen, FIOH, introduced some basic ideas concerning the use of the list of references. A full reference is important for making the publication easy to be found in information searches.

There exist different reference styles (e.g. name and year system; alphabet-number system and citation order system), which all are acceptable. The Vancouver style, which is a citation order system, is widely used in the field of medical publications and thus recommendable to be used in Baltic Sea Network as well.

The detailed instructions how to list references in Vancouver style can be found in the address: http://www.acponline.org/journals/resource/unifreqr.htr.

As a conclusion of discussions the group agreed about the following list of the Baltic Sea Network development items (examples):

1. A contact list of institutions in the field of OH & S, with a few lines about the role and responsibilities of the institution in OH & S - a start for a directory
- this is a priority task because it provides quick identification of national institutions by type of major responsibilities and capacities; it is enough to include 1-2 sentences to succinctly describe each institution.

2. National directory of OH & S institutions (draft directory first)
- profile 2-5 most important institutions first
- immediate full coverage not required
- important to start the activity as soon as possible

3. A list of occupational diseases from each country
- an easy task to accomplish
- these information are of immediate interest and should be incorporated to the www soonest
- special regional submenu will be opened

4. Seafarers' OH & S contact points at ports
- list and contact information of health centres/units responsible for seamen's health care at each of the national ports
- what services available, opening hours etc.

5. Statistics on OH & S
- special regional submenu by country will be opened
- include any available statistics, make comments if required
- the more detailed the better

6. Agricultural OH & S
- situation description (number of farmers or agricultural workers, nature of agriculture, any legislation or lack of it, accidents and occupational diseases, registered, estimated?)
- following initial situation description: perhaps a joint activity, proposal to international funding agencies

7. OH & S specialist/professional manpower by country
- a special regional submenu will be opened with entries to each member country
- numbers
- description of training and education by each group (Physician, nurse, hygienist, safety officer, psychologist, ergonomist
- certification system, if any

8. Legislation and regulations
- specific regional submenu
- lists of laws and regulations that deal with OH & S
- full-text documents for important laws
- etc.

9. Inclusion of any relevant materials on OH & S (forms, etc.)

In addition specific joint projects and programmes could be introduced, e.g. international EU projects. Linkages will be made to funding agencies of Tacis, Phare etc.

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