Policy level interventions for organizational health: Development and evolution of the uk management standards

Abstract

In 2000, the UK Health and Safety Commission (HSC), the body at the time responsible for health and safety matters in the UK, set targets for the overall reduction in the burden of occupational health (including that of the contribution from work-related stress). As a result, a 10-year priority programme was devised to meet these targets. A key part of the intervention programme was the development of the concept of a series of Management Standards together with a suite of associated resources that would allow organizations to both gauge their performance and to facilitate continuous improvement in both individual and organizational key performance indicators. We recognize that health is a multidimensional concept, that the most effective strategy is to tackle health inequalities at a population level and that individual and organizational health is inextricably linked albeit sometimes in complex ways. The Management Standards themselves consist of both a desirable state to be achievedfor individual psychosocial work characteristics (what to do and what it shoul loo) and a process by which organizations can assess and manage their exposure to such factors (how to do it) and implement interventions. In the context of the current book such interventions are designed to help organizations move from a less healthy state to a more healthy one even though the rationale behind the targets was to lessen the likelihood of individual ill-health using a risk based paradigm. But this can equally well be seen within a salutogenic model for promoting health. Although there are weaknesses as well as strengths in the current approach (which we discuss) we think the Management Standards approach provides a useful model for the improvement of organizational health. We describe a series of developments that have been designed to improve usability of the methodology and widen the scope of the Management Standards.