The Republic faces a significant challenge in expanding research to contribute to better health and safety at work, a conference was told at the weekend.
Dr Alan Woodside, development director of the Occupational Health and Safety Institute in Ireland (OHSII), said that too little attention was given to research targeted at workplace risks. He was speaking at the spring meeting of the Irish Society of Occupational Medicine.
He pointed out that OHSII was an all-Ireland body which adopted a "borderless" approach to its work, he said. On the challenges it faced, he specified the need to obtain good data and to define the problem in terms of the cost and burden posed by injury and ill-health in the workplace.
Dr Woodside called for a debate on the acceptability of risk in order to define how safe society wants work to be. He said that the changing nature of work and the emergence of new risks to health and safety needed to be acknowledged.
He promised that the OHSII would lead the debate North and South on occupational health and safety and would attempt to influence policy in this area.