The “European Week for Health and Safety at Work”, held in Italy from 21-25 October 2002, during the recent Fiera del Levante, presented the occasion for a detailed study on prevention in places of work at large.
This initiative concretized in a carefully designed campaign to sensitize and promote safety in areas of “production”. The campaign is scheduled to take place every October in all countries belonging to the European Union and is promoted by the current 15 member states, the European Commission, the Parliament, leading Trade Unions and employers’ associations. It represents an immediate opportunity for discussion, which is offered systematically to all institutions and organizations involved in this special problem, with the purpose of stressing the important role played by safety and health in places of work in today’s society. Hence every opportunity directed at motivating the formation of a safety orientated mentality and at privileging the promotion of all didactic activities targeted at cutting down work-related risks is welcome. These didactic activities should “Produce” information and training for individuals involved in “real production” in Europe as a country, also in line with the additions Legislative Decree No. 626 dated 19 September 1994 has made to our regulations.1 The “European Week” is organized and directed by the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work, formed by the European Council on July 18 1994 with Regulation No. 2062/94/EC2 , later modified by Regulation 1643/95/CE3 , which was adopted by the Council on June 28 1995. The Agency’s institutional duties comprise developing, analysing and spreading all the latest scientific information that can be useful to promote a constant improvement in living conditions in the place of work. It carries out the above by organizing targeted initiatives and by scheduling the release of strictly scientific publications of a very high standard. It is directed by a Governing Body4 formed by the Governments of member States, the European Commission and historically rival social groups such as trade unions and employers’ organizations. The Agency makes use of national networks, independently made available and organized by member states, and of the typical and specialized institutions chosen by the same. These structures must collect, coordinate and transmit all information concerning the risks and needs stated by their territory and useful towards the European Agency’s special duties. The I. S. P. E. S. L. (Istituto Superiore per la Prevenzione e la Sicurezza del Lavoro [The Higher Institute for Prevention and Safety at Work]) is in charge of this in Italy. It is formed and organized by Law No. 833 dated December 23 19785 , which must be considered in conjunction with Presidential Decree No. 619 dated July 31 19806 . This institute’s main activity consists in experimenting and processing criteria and methodologies for the prevention of accidents at work and occupational diseases; it offers consultancies in designing national and regional health schemes and puts forward proposals on general questions related to the health and safety of the working environment and, in the sphere of hospital administrations and Local Health Authorities, it certifies the safe conditions of the place of work.

Concerning the subject or better the theme on which the European Week’s debate fully focussed, we must stress the great relevance of the topics discussed. The title was “Working stressfully”. This choice rose from the observation that in Europe:

- over 50% of workers has declared that they perform their work at an excessively fast rate; and,

- over 9% has reported that they were the targets of threats at work.

On October 23 2002 attention focussed on mobbing7 , a form of “psychological terror” exercised at work by means of repeated attacks on the part of colleagues and employers. A survey conducted by the I. S. P. E. S. L. revealed that in our country workers struck by this phenomenon are one and a half million - in many cases the repercussions are noticeable both at work and at home. The debate resulted in preventive measures that involved removing the premises for mobbing such as job uncertainty, the poor quality of relations between personnel and the management and conflicts of roles. Stress and more besides… the European week was the occasion to emphasize that safety in the place of work is also implemented by the correct maintenance and use of machinery and safety devices and by workers’ adequate and constant training with regard to the special risks their jobs involve.

Three fields were chosen to conduct an in-depth study at the conference: ships, buildings and schools. The latter has become the most importance of all, especially in the light of what happened in Molise soon after the initiative was taken. Pages and pages have been written to commemorate the very young victims of the collapsed buildings and to describe the fear and anxiety experienced by the populace, struck by the earthquake and crushed in its affections. After the fear and the anger there came for all the moment to learn from past mistakes, in order to avoid recurrences. What took place clearly showed that safety is not a concept to be acquired in the abstract, but an objective standard of assessment for common action, hence a stable constant in all steps involving estimates and schedules for interventions on the territory. The topic calls for an outline of the reference legislative picture on which safety in school buildings is based. The reference to the Ministerial Decree dated December 18 1975, whose subject “Updated technical regulations related to the building of schools including indexes of the lowest didactic, building and town planning functionality, to be followed in performing school building works” is essential. This ministerial measure specified the “ideal” conditions (which in many cases are still only “virtual”) of access, stability, plant engineering and planning these buildings had to conform to8 . The following Legislative Decree No. 46/90 regulated the technical aspects related to the safety of the various systems in school buildings (heating, wiring, pipelines etc.). Ministerial Decree dated August 26 1992, stating “Fire Prevention Measures in School Buildings”, specified some of the precautions that luckily proved providential in the Molise disaster, such as evacuation measures in case of an emergency. The ministerial circular letter No. 119 dated April 29 1999, whose subject was: “Legislative Decree No. 626/94 and following modifications and integrations – Ministerial Decree No. 382/98: safety…omitted”, provides the necessary specifications to implement safety orientated works in schools. The “employer” is precisely identified in the figure of the headmaster, in charge of the duties and responsibilities specified in the regulation in question and, by equalization, students are assigned the status of “employees”. These regulations stress that the activities related to structural and maintenance interventions, required to guarantee the safety of the premises and buildings given over to schools, are charged to the local authorities who are legally responsible for their supply and maintenance. In this direction Legislative Decree No. 626/94 prescribes that the obligations related to the above mentioned interventions must be fulfilled by headmasters after the request for the permission to carry out these works is presented to the competent local authorities: the municipality, for primary and secondary schools; the province for the entire category of high schools. The employer, as specified by the already mentioned Ministerial Decree No. 292 dated June 21 1996, has to perform the various duties of a general nature basically concerning activities directed at training and informing the staff concerned; he must also assess risks and subsequently draft documents and organize a prevention and protection service for the so-called ‘sensitive figures’. Other points in the above mentioned circular letter No. 119, relevant towards today’s considerations, describe how to draft a risk assessment document (as per art. 4 of Legislative Decree No. 626/94), and those stated at point E integrate regulations concerning “The Supervision of Health”. With regard to the latter, the ministerial order introduces the issue by noticing the marked distinction between competent doctor, introduced by Legislative Decree No. 626/94, and the school doctor, specified by Health regulations at large. The latter is merely given a control function (thus stressing his special competences) to be conducted in advance, that is periodically, in order to check the absence of contraindications to the worker’s (student’s) performance of certain activities. Hence the receivers of the health supervision are the school’s staff and students in certain types of cultural institutions, to be precise those who make use of machinery and equipment that is particularly risky health-wise. Only in these cases must the headmaster, who is responsible for its organization in a system of conventions with public institutions willing to meet the need, assure health supervision. Item F in this circular letter prescribed headmasters the obligation to be trained and updated on the subject. To this end the Ministry of Public Education was assigned the duty to arrange and organize a special self-training course conducted on a multimedia system, to meet the related operational obligations, also involving a certificate of completion of the course. Annexed to the circular letter is also a survey form. Its purpose is to report and grade the risky situations noticed (safety hazards; health hazards: risks from physical, chemical and biological agents; safety and health hazards).

The recent incidents in Molise, the news centring on them and the cry of a mother directly involved in the tragedy who hopes in “safer schools for our children!” (a concept that was also repeated by our President!), forcefully draw everyone’s attention to the problem of the safety of school buildings. The “mapping” of these buildings has been organized in our country since 1997 through the work carried out by the National Council for Scientific Research’s group for the defence against earthquakes. The result of this mapping process was later sent to the authorities concerned in order to schedule the economic resources required for interventions to adjust situations to current safety regulations. This work enabled (or it would be better to say “would have enabled”, considering the sluggishness of certain Regional administrations!) to spot the school buildings that required more attention, in other words those built diverging from technical regulations before the same were issued. If the competent authorities (Firemen and Local Health Authorities) declared and ascertained that a building was unfit, the regulation clearly specified the need to resort to another civil building that offered the same degree of safety and that should become a school building should the necessity arise. The regulation also specified a course to simplify bureaucratic procedures and along with it also an innovative administrative tool, that would quite exceptionally enable to overcome bureaucratic aspects, thus speeding up the acts in a procedure. This consists in resorting to the Conference of Services to change the destination of use of a civil building into a school.

The term safety should not only be declared in a series of technical regulations that need to be applied; it must become a mental attitude that leads to the performance of public interventions in the absolute respect of people and things, especially the concrete ones that are the result of a lifetime’s work for every family.Hence the wish that training courses will be organized systematically inside schools, starting from the compulsory educational period, so that children may develop an awareness of their health. The planning phase of these courses should involve, through interdisciplinary didactic interventions, the highly qualified human resources present in university and health institutions and 1st and 2nd level teachers, the latter especially in the didactic field. They should not be merely involved to impart notions by simply handing out information, but they should be the protagonists of didactic and training processes that offer a high standard of health education. Hence health education must be introduced as a curricular activity in schools, directed at creating a system:

a) the formation, in children and adolescents, of a health awareness directed at defending their health. This could be implemented by leaving the child-user the possibility of considering and analysing his well being and unease also with his parents, outside the traditional technical and sanitary pattern that rarely keeps count of the individual as a combination of body and psyche. In this context it could be useful to get students to retrace their health history by collecting information, always respecting their privacy, from parents and those who can help them (i.e. their paediatrician, in other words the family doctor who thus would be involved in their scholastic and social formation!);

b) the formation of individual and collective awareness on their respective living conditions: considerations on eating habits at home, harmful environments, the risks presented by genetic modifications, drugs, harmful living conditions and the risk of fire and earthquakes;

c) training towards disease prevention, backed by a correct and uninfluenced information on the harmfulness of what is usually done, used and eaten in daily life;

d) lastly training to know the body and take care of it and its physiology: how the body works, what it needs, what it needs to develop and avoid early aging, what it appreciates and what it does not etc.

The above in order to assure the society and the families that form this society the right support and to help citizens collectively question the future. Hence the social demand will be more sensitized towards a safer scholastic, working and leisure time offer and will better represent the target quality of the future society, which can be free of the collective tragedies we still witness today.

Notes

1 Legislative decree No.626 dated December 19 1994 regulates the improvement of safety and health conditions of workers in their place of work; it implements regulations 89/391/EEC, 89/654/EEC, 89/655/EEC, 89/656/EEC, 90/269/EEC, 90/270/EEC, 90/394/EEC and 90/679/EEC;

2 See GUCE L 216 dated August 20 1994;

3 See GUCE L 156 dated July 7 1995;

4 The European Council is composed of 48 members, thus divided:
a) number 15 representing the governments of member states;
b) number 15 representing employers’ organizations;
c) number 15 representing workers’ organizations;
d) number 3 representing the European Commission.
The mandate lasts 3 years and is renewable. The Council decides with two-thirds majority votes. It appoints the President and three vice-presidents.

5 Law No. 833 dated December 23 1978 establishes the “Institution of the National Health Service”;

6 Presidential decree No. 619 dated July 31 1980 establishes the “Institution of the Higher Institute for Prevention and Safety at work”;

7 The purpose of mobbing is to remove the person who is, or has become, in some way “difficult”, destroying him psychologically and socially so as to cause his dismissal or to lead him to resign.

8 Formerly this subject was regulated in the sphere of building permits, following the building committee’s close examination and the opinions expressed on fire-fighting measures by the firemen and in the sphere of health by the competent doctors.

Translated by interpres sas