The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) has published a discussion paper on the role of occupational physicians and health and safety specialists in ensuring compliance with occupational safety rules across Europe. The publication, titled “Occupational Medicine in the EU: The Specialist Doctors’ Perspective”, runs to 28 pages and draws on survey data from the Occupational Medicine section of the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS-OM). The document maps how occupational physicians operate across Europe and the challenges they face, with particular attention to the ageing workforce.
Legal obligation as the main driver
The research finds that the primary reason organisations provide occupational health services is the legal obligation to do so. The paper states this explicitly: the statutory duty to provide such support is the leading driver behind the provision of occupational medicine services. This confirms a pattern long recognised within the sector: compliance with legislation is often the first, and sometimes the only, motivation behind investment in occupational health care, rather than a genuine corporate commitment to health and wellbeing.
The discussion paper covers three main themes. First, current practice in occupational medicine; second, the bottlenecks the profession faces; and third, the measurable added value that occupational health services deliver for workplaces across the European Union. EU-OSHA explicitly positions the research as a contribution to the broader “Supporting compliance” initiative, aimed at strengthening adherence to occupational safety rules across member states.
Ageing workforce identified as pressing challenge
A central finding of the research is that European workplaces must adapt to far-reaching structural change, with the ageing workforce singled out as a particularly urgent concern. According to the paper, this calls for targeted occupational health interventions, although the source material does not specify what concrete measures are being proposed.
Relevance for EHS practice
For EHS and HSE professionals, this research is significant because it offers a rare quantitative insight into how the occupational medicine profession itself assesses its own functioning and constraints. In many EU member states, occupational physicians are a mandatory link in the compliance chain around working conditions, from periodic medical examinations to advice on workplace adaptations. When the profession itself reports that legal obligation is the primary driver, it raises questions about the extent to which occupational health is also viewed as a strategic priority independent of legislation within organisations. In addition, the ageing of the workforce bears directly on practical EHS themes such as adapted workplace design, longer careers and the need for preventive health management — issues that have long been on the agenda in practice, but which this research now underpins explicitly from a medical-specialist perspective.
Source: Occupational medicine and compliance: insights from a survey of Europe’s specialists, 10 September 2026, https://osha.europa.eu/en/highlights/occupational-medicine-and-compliance-insights-survey-europes-specialists
