Occupational Health & Safety

Occupational health and safety studies the physical, chemical, ergonomic and psychosocial load of work, and the employer's statutory duty to control that load. The field works with risk assessment (RI&E in the Netherlands), exposure limits and the hierarchy of control: remove the source first, then engineering measures, then organisation, only then personal protection.

FM manages the physical environment in which that load arises: climate, lighting, workstation layout, hazardous substances in maintenance and cleaning. A building decision FM considers technically sound can still fall short under employment-safety law, and conversely a safety requirement sometimes demands a technical intervention FM should not judge alone, without the occupational-safety professional.

• Which risks in the RI&E touch the physical workplace and therefore fall under FM oversight?
• Is a measure genuine source control, or personal protection sold as a solution?
• Who is liable when a contracted party fails to meet on-site safety conditions?
• How is psychosocial load — workload, aggression, isolation — actually measured in a shared building?

• Dutch Working Conditions Act and Decree; comparable framework legislation elsewhere (e.g. EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC).
• ISO 45001 — occupational health and safety management systems.
• Occupational-hygiene and ergonomics literature; occupational physicians and safety services as practice sources.

• An RI&E is a legal document, not an FM checklist; FM executes what it states but does not determine it unilaterally.
• For contracted staff on site, the duty of care runs via the host-employer concept; that must be explicitly allocated in contract.
• Workplace health is not the same as workplace experience: an ergonomically correct workstation can still be experienced as unpleasant.

• Workplace management and facility support
• Cleaning and hazardous substances handling

• Risk assessment in cooperation with the occupational safety service
• Ergonomic workstation assessment

• In-house (retained) delivery organisation

  In-house staff keeps the duty of care with one employer; contracted staff fragments it.

• Regieorganisatie — managing organisation / intelligent client function

  The regieorganisatie must demonstrably oversee suppliers' safety compliance, not only delivery.

• ISO 45001; national occupational safety legislation (jurisdiction-dependent).

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• Personal protective equipment presented as a structural solution to a source problem.
• A workplace satisfaction score confused with statutory safety compliance.

Psychosocial workload in hybrid and flexible work settings is hard to measure because exposure is no longer tied to one fixed place; there is no widely accepted method for attributing it to a specific location or service.

• ISO 45001:2018, occupational health and safety management systems.
• EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC.