Message from WHO Director General, Halfdan T. Mahler, MD, and greetings from host region of WHO

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Abstract
The International Conference on Primary Health Care—attended by delegations from 134 governments, representatives of 67 United Nations organizations, specialized agencies and non-governmental organizations, Alma-Ata, USSR, September 1978, made a very important recommendation (Number 8): that high priority should be given to the special needs of vulnerable and high-risk groups. One group to which special reference is made in this section of the report is the working population. Following up this recommendation, in WHO's programmes on Worker's Health at the global and regional levels, three main issues are tackled: (a)the lack of coherent and comparable statistics on occupational injuries: a programme of work aiming at the development of standard reporting systems has been initiated, to be followed by field trials in various countries for feasibility and eventual use in reporting occupational injuries on a priority basis (b)the full participation of workers must be assured, human behaviour, training, and psychological and physical status play an important role in the causation of occupational accidents and consequently in controlling them. However, we must remember that it is sometimes too easy to blame somebody for an accident. This also limits investigations leading to a gathering of relevant data and establishing causation (c)epidemiology: as far as occupational accidents and injury are concerned, this field is still in its infancy and there is a need to develop a proper methodology for the investigation of occupational accidents when they occur, and for the analysis of the data WHO and ILO will be organizing a meeting in November 1986 to discuss this topic, and, for example, in the European Region a similar study is also under way which will contribute to the global efforts in this area.

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