Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2012. It describes the legal framework (Law 31/1995 and Royal Decree 39/1997) as of 2012; both have been amended since and should be checked against current Spanish regulations.
Let’s start from the premise that health protection, occupational safety and hygiene are fundamental rights set out in the 1978 Spanish Constitution, and have become basic rights of every citizen.
With that in mind, companies need to weigh the reasons for and against having their own Company Medical Service at their workplaces.
Having this service in the company is a social benefit for workers, a way to avoid absenteeism caused by common illnesses among staff, and a form of occupational risk prevention against accidents and costly compensation claims that could hurt the productivity of the business.
Assessing the need for the service
The most obvious example is the smoker. More and more companies keep their workspaces smoke-free and off-limits to smokers. Employees who need to smoke have to step outside their workplace to do it. How much working time do they lose? Paying for a smoking-cessation program benefits the employee, who quits (occupational risk prevention), and the company, which no longer loses time to smoking breaks (cost reduction).
What a Company Medical Service delivers
First of all, we should be clear about the functions this service brings to the company, such as:
- Promoting and maintaining workers’ physical, mental and social well-being.
- Preventing harm caused by the working conditions of their professional environment.
- Protecting them from health risks caused by external agents in the workplace.
- Improving the employee’s physical condition by adapting the worker to the job and vice versa.
When these core functions are properly carried out, the company should see the following benefits:
- Anticipating the time lost to employee illness and acting to reduce it.
- Analyzing whether illnesses stem from employees’ personal lives or are related to work.
- Finding preventive measures and checking that they work, to reduce the cost of sick-leave absenteeism.
These are the guidelines laid down by the relevant regulations. However, any workplace measure a company takes should be guided by mutual benefit for worker and employer, understood as follows:
Companies will have healthier, safer workers, avoiding financial costs and lifting their staff’s morale, while for employees it is undoubtedly an improvement in their quality of life.
Regulation
The Company Medical Service is governed by the Occupational Risk Prevention Act (Ley de Prevención de Riesgos Laborales, Law 31/1995 of 8 November) and the Prevention Services Regulation (Reglamento de los Servicios de Prevención, Royal Decree 39/1997 of 17 January), which set out how company medical services operate and the rules for developing their protection and prevention systems. This latter regulation modified Decree 1036/1959 of 10 June, which had governed company medical services since they were created in the late 1950s.
Featured image: Marjory Collins, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
