What place for nurses in occupational health and safety?

Scientific managers

Aymeric LE CORRE (Sociologist, University of Poitiers, GRESCO) William FRICONNEAU (Health manager in Lumanisy) Romain Davière (Sociologist, Sorbonne University, GEMASS) Guillaume Beaumatin (Research Paramedic Manager, CHU de Poitiers)

At a time when the French Ministry of Health and Prevention is considering the re-engineering of nursing training, the place of these professionals around health and safety issues must be questioned. Indeed, while France is singled out as Europe’s poor student in terms of fatal accidents, a 4th occupational health plan was created in 2021 to try to remedy the numerous workplace accidents. This plan, which ends in 2025, has defined priorities for prevention, improving working conditions and strengthening local support. Thus, it provides a glimpse of all the opportunities for nurses to take their place in these systems.

With the skills already possessed by these health professionals, the context of medical shortage including that of occupational health doctors leads us to question the perspectives that are today offered to nurses. Where advanced practice nurses exist in certain hospital departments, the relevance of these new professionals in occupational health services becomes strong. Nurses are not absent from the systems that affect health and safety at work, such as in companies, occupational health services or even those lesser known in vocational high schools. They are also on the front line in a health system where work intensification makes work “unsustainable” (Beatriz, 2023). However, questions remain as research work on these professionals is very few and poorly publicized.

We propose, through the communications proposed, to question their environment, their practices and even their trajectories in a fairly broad manner. Indeed, these nurses act at the crossroads of numerous health and safety actors defining professional boundaries which are sometimes the site of social struggles. It necessarily questions the opposition between health and work, which will need to be clarified. This invites us to take into account the resistance and the opportunities that exist today in the face of the specific skills that these nurses can deploy in their exercises ?

Beyond the question of the evolution of the field of skills and the resistance that may exist in the field of health and safety at work, what is the added value of nurses today in the different places of practice? Often described in hospitals, the autonomous role of the nurse is little documented with regard to this field of occupational health and is even ignored by their nursing peers. What about it?

Basically, this event aims to shed light on the profile of these health and prevention professionals, to report on their working conditions, the means and constraints will thus be explored.

Finally, this event aims to bring together the fields of research (sociology, public health, nursing sciences, etc.) and the economic field. It aims to bring together researchers, occupational health and safety professionals, but also economic players with the aim of contributing to the study of the role of French and foreign nurses on these public health issues.