As of January this year the PEROSH chairmanship has switched from Didier Baptist (INRS) to me. Let me thus briefly introduce myself and my new team to you: My name is Dietmar Reinert and I am the director of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance (IFA). I have been an active member of the PEROSH group since 2008. Also, Paulien Bongers, the director of TNO‘s Prevention, Work & Health unit, has been appointed the new vice chairwoman of PEROSH. Parallel with the new chairpersons PEROSH also appointed a new European Affairs Coordinator situated at IFA in Sankt Augustin: Daniela Treutlein, a German national who lived and worked in The Netherlands for six years before she returned to the Bonn region last summer. In my view, Daniela is the perfect successor to Claire Dubois, continuing Claire’s excellent network coordination and giving new input and impulses stemming from her experience as EU coordinator of the TNO business unit work & employment.
The first half of 2015 we concentrated on the following three aspects: improving networking among PEROSH researchers, strengthening the visibility of the network in the EU arena and establishing our presence in the new media.
Regarding networking within PEROSH, we are just about to hold the 1st PEROSH Research Exchange in Warsaw at CIOP-PIB’s premises with the focus on “Translational research in OSH”. This event will connect senior and junior researchers within the PEROSH group via presentations and discussions on applicable and transferable OSH solutions in three parallel sessions on: Ageing at work, e-tools for working environments and prevention through design. Well-known key note speakers will kick-off the parallel sessions in the morning and afternoon of 22 October. We hope that Warsaw will thus further bridge researchers and their specific know how so that PEROSH is more and more becoming a ‘European family of OSH researchers’.
With three position papers we published together with the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work we have provided important research ideas for the upcoming EU Horizon 2020 research programs:
1. “Challenge of Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies: The changing world of work and OSH”,
2. “Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies: Prevention through Design” and
3. “Health, demographic change and wellbeing: Occupational safety and health in the context of demographic change”
(to download visit: https://perosh.eu/perosh-and-eu-osha-position-papers-launched/). The papers are the outcome of two workshops on research priorities in OSH organized by EU-OSHA. In the meantime, Daniela has presented them together with our views about future OSH research and innovation priorities at several workshops in Brussels. A summary article has just been published in the September edition of the British journal SHP Safety and Health Practitioner, see http://www.shponline.co.uk/future-proofing/?cid=searchresult. We further intend to intensify the collaboration with other European networks such as ESIP, EU-VRi and ETPIS to jointly promote our ideas in the European arena.
Concerning the third aspect, we are happy that PEROSH has its own Twitter account since June! Engaging in Twitter is an easy and useful way to share and update each other on interesting OSH results, research projects, challenges and trends. If you follow @PEROSH_EU and the individual member institutes via your own profile you can see interesting and nearly real-time news from the network and all partners on your own personalized news stream ‘Home’. You can thus read your own, international PEROSH and OSH newspaper while commuting to work and spread interesting news easily among your own followers by clicking ‘retweet’. Also, you can directly get into contact with your European researcher colleagues by clicking ‘reply’ in case you see a link to an interesting study. So, get involved by creating your own Twitter profile and start to tweet and retweet about PEROSH and PEROSH members using the hashtag #PEROSH, #INRS, #OSH, etc. frequently in your tweets!
You see, the target-oriented efforts and excellent work of our French predecessors is being continued. I hope you will enjoy reading about more detailed project news and members’ updates below, via social media and on our website: www.perosh.eu.
Dietmar Reinert
PEROSH CHAIRMAN
