Recently I stumbled on a weblog from an occupational physician from Romania. He posted some interesting posts on the Occupational Health situation in Romania and makes an interesting comparison between France and Romania in that perspective.

I commented on his blog by giving some figures on the Dutch situation:

“The overall population of the Netherlands: 16,5 million inhabitants, the working population is estimated a bit over 7 million. There are approximately 2000-2200 occupational physicians (The professional society on occupational medicine counts 2150 members).

The professional training of OP’s takes four years and there are no general practitioners involved in occupational health. Like in France a big cohort will retire in the next 5-10 years and not too many new occupational physicians start a career in occupational health.

In the Dutch occupational health system there are occupational health services (OHS) that have contracts with tens of hundreds employers and there are internal occupational health services in the bigger companies and organizations. These OHS’ employ occupational physicians, industrial hygienist, safety engineers, organizational psychologists and ergonomists. There is a growing number (250-300) occupational physicians that work freelance for companies.

A lot of the working time of the OP is spend on work ability assessment and rehabilitation. Besides that the OP takes up the same tasks as in France and Romania.”