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Proteger, media partner, has recently published an insightful interview with Emília Telo, Coordinator of ACT (Autoridade para as Condições do Trabalho) the Portuguese National Focal Point (FOP), featured in their latest online magazine edition. The conversation not only provides an overview of EU-OSHA's work but also dives into the ongoing campaign and active involvement of the FOP.

The magazine piece underlines the Agency’s commitment to fostering safer and healthier European workplaces through its Healthy Workplaces campaigns since 2000. With a current focus on digitalisation and occupational safety and health (OSH), EU-OSHA and the FOP are committed to raising awareness, offering practical resources, and driving collaboration in alignment with the EU Strategic Framework for Health and Safety at Work 2021-2027 and the European Digital Strategy. 

Since the launch of the campaign in Portugal on 25 October, a series of initiatives have been conducted, engaging employers, workers, OSH professionals, and other stakeholders. The FOP encourages organisations across all sectors to undertake activities related to the campaign's theme and cooperate with them. Mrs. Telo provides several examples of such actions, including training events, seminars, workshops, OSH demonstrations, exhibitions, poster or quiz competitions, partnerships between companies and educational institutions. For inspiration, she highlights the campaign toolkit designed to facilitate the initiatives.

The Head of the FOP also  emphasises the different priority areas of the campaign such as, Digital platform work, Use of systems or technical procedures to allow a device or system to execute (partially or fully) a function that was previously, or conceivably could be, carried out (partially or fully) by a human. of tasks and Remote and hybrid work. To support this last topic, a new OiRA tool for teleworking was published in September 2023. This tool assists both employers and teleworkers in improving the work environment at home.

The expert discusses stakeholder involvement through competitions, mentioning that each campaign presents the Healthy Workplaces Good Practice Awards and the Healthy Workplaces Film Award. Nationally, there is another award, “Health and Safety at Work: Participate - Innovate - Deliver", aimed at vocational education, the main objective of which is to create a piece of work with innovative content in the field of OSH, to be presented in a video format.

The interview concludes by mentioning the recent safety conference in Portugal, PROTEGER 2024, addressing the issue of sustainability and OSH. Among the session themes, the conference touched upon Wearables are electronic devices with sensors and computational capacity (e.g. smart watches, data glasses, or other devices with embedded sensors or tags), which can be placed on different body parts to gather data to be fed into other digital systems for processing purposes. They can be used to analyse physiological and psychological data such as feelings, sleep, movements, heart rate, body temperature and blood pressure, via applications either installed on the device itself or on external devices, such as smartphones connected to the cloud. and AI, working security and smart standards in the digital age.

Read the full interview in Portuguese in the online magazine here.