Maritime Health Research and Education-NET/OCCUPATIONAL MARITIME HEALTH AND SAFETY EDUCATION

The maritime occupational health portal

The special features of seafaring and its consequences for the health, fitness and wellbeing of those who work at sea is the main subject of the Norwegian Textbook of Maritime Medicine. However, the Textbook does not intend to give the needed current and updated information about the workplace exposures at sea for the prevention and for training and education in maritime occupational health and safety. The education and training is offered by other institutions like the Danish "Seahealth and Wellfare" and the Danish Fishermen’s Occupational Health Services and similar organisations in other countries. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work also provides training and information ressources for the fishermen, but scare for seafarers and stevedores What is lacking in any of these ressources is a permanent updated "first stop" evidence and training ressource for each of the specific maritime type of jobs to comply with the main prevention strategies. This is done e.g. by the Norwegian "Arbejdsmiljøportal" and the outcome of the MAHRE-Net surveillances is needed to produce similar evidence based maritime health and safety education. "Arbejdsmiljøportalen" underscore the need to work efficiently and correctly and by the use of: 1. updated factual knowledge as a basis and 2 the guidelines, instructions and training we know will work. Similarly we must have a "Maritime Occupational Health Portal" to present the updated specific exposure and health indicators for the specific ship types profiles from the facts produced by the MAHRE-Net and other ongoing surveillance that are important to them and which we know work. MAHRE-Net will produce the knowledge part of maritime occupational health while the other institutions will produce the guideline for how to produce the best environment at the specific workplaces on solutions which we know work. In conclusion: The Portal unites 1. the latest updated knowledge about the risk indicators for specific areas of the maritime workplaces with 2. the latest and known effective solutions for the environment in the specific workplaces by links to the specific institutions that produce the instructions. This collaboration will be done with the new strategy for occupational healt, the "Tre-parts aftaler om Arbejdsmiljø" 22 Dec 2020 with similar agreements in other countries. The agreement opens up for the mentioned collaboration of the knowledge producing institutes and the training and education units.