Baltic Sea Network on Occupational Health and Safety

Introduction

The meeting was the third meeting for the coordinators of the Baltic Sea Network on Occupational Health and Safety project. The contact persons from six countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden were invited to participate. In addition, three members of the Finnish planning group of the project participated at the meeting.

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

Milvi Jänes, Head of Department, Estonian Ministry of Social Affairs, opened the meeting and wished the participants welcome.

Status Report of the Project

Anneli Vartio, FIOH, gave an overview about the situation of the project. Estonia opened their pages in December 1998, Sweden in January 1999 and the English pages of Poland were opened in March 1999. At the moment eight of ten participating countries have opened their homepages to the network. A rough overview about the content of the network information is in Annex 3.

As to the horizontal networking at the country level most participating countries have started to collaborate with the most important partners in the country, in order to inform them about the project and organize information collection for the network among the domestic institutions.

An overview about the actions taken with the possible funding agencies were given. Preliminary contacts have been taken to e.g. ILO, Nordic Council of Ministers, European Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Finland. Formal applications for funding are still to be made during the year 1999 to some of these agencies.

The list of prioritized activities for the period 1999-2000 made at the last WHO/EURO Baltic Sea Network meeting in Sagadi, Estonia, was discussed (Annex 4). More detailed information about the fulfilment of these actions were given in the country reports following the status report.

Country reports

Russia

The Russian focal point at the MAPS has started the horizontal networking with the relevant institutions. A questionnary has been sent to the departments of the institute and official letters to other institutions. A contact list of institutions has been prepared in English and in Russian, the latter one being very complete. Material about subject areas, statistics and legislation has been feeded. Full texts are in Russian with English summaries. Main legal acts will be translated into English. There is a lot of material available but the translation into English is a question of resources and time.

Lithuania

New pages have been created: statistics, legislation (full text in English about the most important acts), list of occupational diseases. Organizational profiles have been systematically collected, and a national directory in Lithuanian and in English is under preparation. The questionnary form sent to 80 most important institutions in the field is attached in Annex 5. The response rate to the inquiry has, however, been relatively low.

Estonia

The country pages are in English and in Estonian with some differences according to the interests of the target groups. Information has been feeded e.g. on: structure of the Estonian work environment system, national policy and programme for the development of the work environment, and contact information. Many institutions in the field have own homepages which can be linked to the BSN pages of Estonia, e.g. Occupational Health Centre, Society of Occupational Health Physicians, and Estonian Association of Occupational Disease Patients. The horizontal networking will start during this spring.

Poland

The Baltic Sea Network project has been accepted as an official project in the Polish focal point, Lodz Institute. English pages for the network has been prepared, e.g. background information, contact information, legislation, and list of occupational diseases. 4 of 5 most important institutes in the country have homepages, which have been linked to BSN Polish pages. List of occupational diseases (20 diseases) is unofficial and collected from own sources. The selection of the relevant information is a problem because there is so much information available, e.g. the most important act, labour code has 300 separate items. At the moment it is planned what kind of information the five most important institutes can provide for the network. Also organizational profiles will be collected.

Latvia

The English homepage has been updated with organizational profile of IOEH (two other institutions under preparation), information by subject areas (agriculture, forestry and seafarers), training and legislation (incl. information on occupational diseases 1998). Latvian version of the homepage of IOEH is also available. The training information is collected by the institute itself, since most of the courses are organized by IOEH. The national network meeting has been postponed from November 1998 to April 1999. Latvian language homepage of BSN will be presented in the Conference of Latvian Occupational Physicians. Homepage of the State Labour Inspection is under construction and planned to be opened in summer 1999.

Sweden

The Swedish pages constructed at NIWL (National Institute for Working Life) opened in January 1999 with background information and a list of institutes. Statistics, legislation and training information will be included in near future. The training information will be translated into English. Links to other institutions in the field will be collected.

Finland

The Finnish pages were introduced shortly. They contain the organizational profile of the FIOH and shorter descriptions of other institutions on OH&S in Finland as well as legislation. There are several links to other Finnish institutions in the field.

Discussion

It was pointed out that only the most important national institutions should be profiled in detail keeping in mind that the responsibility of updating the information relies on the national focal point. It was suggested that even if the training for national experts is in national language, the curricula could be translated into English to give information for other countries about the training of specialists in a certain country.

Technical Review

Miikka Rantanen from FIOH gave a short technical review about the structure of the Network. As future challenges from the technical point of view the following items were listed: the creating of a search-engine, the developing of a navigation inside BSN pages and the developing of ways to share technical information between the webmasters. It was suggested that a feedback possibility would be added to the pages.

Incorporation of the ongoing projects to the Baltic Sea Network

Suvi Lehtinen from FIOH described a project started at the FIOH to collect all ongoing projects and collaborative actions in the neighbouring regions. In March 1999 a seminar was organized at the FIOH to review all the projects (total 14) of the Finnish Institute. In addition a standardized questionnary form has been sent to collect information on every ongoing project at FIOH. The questionnary form is attached in Annex 6. The project will result in a project database and an expert database.

In both Estonia and Lithuania a meeting of national institutes is planned to further consolidate the Network.

WHO Collaborating Centres in Occupational Health (WHO CC)

Suvi Lehtinen gave an introduction to the activities of the WHO Collaborating Centres Network. WHO CC is not yet an electronic network but a directory in paper version exists, listing all institutes involved in the network. The organizational framework is similar with the Baltic Sea Network, with a meeting every two year. WHO CC also has a quarterly Newsletter.

Training of occupational safety and hygiene engineers

Bo Dahlner from NIWL gave an overview about the training of occupational safety and hygiene engineers in Sweden and how the training has been modified according to the needs of the working environment since the training started about 40 years ago. After the introduction given by Dr Dahlner the group discussed about the problems in planning the suitable training on national level. The background paper is attached in Annex 7.

The group discussed about teachers qualifications, changes in training curricula in the course of the years, the need for occupational safety and health services to the enterprises, and encouraging the people to participate in training courses.

Discussions of the technical coordinators during the meeting

During the meeting following issues were discussed:

• future development of Baltic Sea Network www-pages
• current hardware environment of the BSN participants
• current software environment of the BSN participants

Also there were some discussion about resources available for www-developers and general discussions about www and the Baltic Sea project

Current situation

From the technical point of view no serious problems exist concerning the BSN. All the participating countries have opened the pages on the www and most of them also maintain their pages on national servers. There have been some connection problems within BSN which seem to originate from the general infrastructure of the country and because of that there is not much to be done. Next major development project will be to start to develop the pages more user-friendly.

Subjects of discussion

1. In the future the navigation inside the pages will be developed more easy and simple. As the amount of data is increasing the navigation issues will come more and more important. One possible solution would be to start to use page template where the user would find local navigation bars on each page. This was shortly discussed among the webmasters but no decisions were made.
   
   
2. When the network is moving towards a pure distributed model, more frequent information exchange between webmasters is needed. During the meeting webmasters agreed that a webmasters mailing list should be created. It also gives a possibility to build a "technical history" for BSN.
   
   
3. It was also agreed that a feedback channel will be created for the network users. It was agreed that every country will build a feedback page for its own site. A few technical problems must be solved before every country has this kind of solution.
   
   
4. There is going to be a new search-engine on the Baltic Sea Network www-pages. There still are problems to be solved before it will be possible to search inside all countries' pages.
   
   
5. It was agreed that a hidden counter will be created in order to have a rough estimate how popular BSN pages are. Some webmasters have an access to their log-files and it is possible to track usage on that way.
   
   
6. The promotion of the network by the webmasters was discussed. It was agreed that the webmasters start to use a so-called META-tags on the pages in order to have more hits. The pages can also be promoted on e.g. national www-directories and search-engines by indexing them.
   
   
7. Yahoo and Altavista will be notified about the Network. It was, however, considered most important that the awareness and usage of the national pages could be increased.

Conclusions of the Meeting

The situation analysis showed:

• a lot of progress in the Network activities and huge development of the country pages since the Second Coordinators' Meeting in Helsinki (Sept '98).
• good model for organizational profiles (Lithuania)
• materials produced and translated to national language (Latvia)
• clear description of the OH & S structure (Estonia)
• a good example of an approach to national horizontal networking (Sweden)
• good coverage of collaborating institutions at the national level (Russia)
• good development of the materials fo the domestic users (Poland)

1. The substantive content of the Network will be increased; suggestions:

• more information on the net about OH & S professionals and their training. A description could be made using NIVA report as a model
• training needs of OH & S professionals in the countries
• clear descriptions on the OH & S structures in the countries
• main laws on OH & S
• more information on training events and courses
• basic publications in OH, incl. good practice guidelines
• basic statistics on occ. diseases, occ. accidents, etc.
• plans of the Institutes for the next year
• links to other networks, such as Bilbao, EASOM, WHO, ILO, ICOH
• Target: in two years time the Baltic Sea Network a source of reliable, relevant and comparable information on OH & S from the Baltic Sea countries

2. National networking will be promoted As an example of a smooth procedure for starting the horizontal networking the Swedish model was given:

• A survey on potential collaborating organizations based on previous contacts and experience
• personal contact (phone call)
• a description of network activities at the national level
• report sent out to all willing to participate and contribute
• provision of www-addresses of relevant organizations in the country and in other network countries
• preparation of the draft version of the country homepages by the time of first meeting, to create a basis for discussion and to get feedback
• creating a reference group - as a resource basis for further development of the pages
• focal point acting as the secretariat in the development process
• committing all collaborating institutions to the work

3. Technical development of the Baltic Sea Network

• search engine allowing search from the network and country pages
• feedback form will be prepared on the web-pages to get feedback from users from further development
• 'hidden' counter on the pages to allow follow-up of the use of the pages
• regular flow of information among the webmasters will be ensured
• start to promote the pages with the use of META-tags and informing other search engines

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