Experiences of successful action programmes for occupational health, safety, and ergonomics promotion in small scale enterprises in Thailand.

Small-scale enterprises are playing a vital role for the national economy in Thailand, creating employment in both urban and rural areas. The improvement of working conditions and occupational safety and health, together with improved productivity has long been a priority. How we could practically provide owners and workers of small-scale enterprises with opportunities for improvement action has been our concern. In the present project, we have adopted a new programme of action which emphasizes participation, a positive approach and locally made solutions. The project site was in Samutprakarn province, an industrial zone near Bangkok. Four local small-scale enterprises participated in the action programme. They were a lead smelting, a dry-cell battery plant, a wet-cell battery plant and a pesticides factory. The programme consisted of the following steps. 1) A demonstration training session was conducted to motivate the enterprises' representatives to take action. Locally invented improvement examples were presented and small group discussion was organized for facilitating their action. 2) The participants were encouraged to use a checklist for assessing safety, health and ergonomic risks in their own workplaces. Concrete action plans were established based on their checklist results. 3) The improvement action started, in which step-by-step approaches were emphasized. Advisory and supporting roles of expert teams comprising the authors and other professionals were important to accelerate and sustain the action at these enterprises. On the basis of this self-help action, the participants were enabled to make many improvements at their workplaces. These improvements developed by their own initiative were multi-factorial. They included 1) machine and electrical safety device, 2) workstation redesign, 3) materials handling improvement, 4) establishing new welfare facilities such as canteens or bathrooms and 5) work environment improvement such as better lighting or enclosure of hazardous substances. Our experiences showed that there was a large potential to initiate local improvement actions and duplicate them in a participatory manner. Of particular importance were the positive attitudes towards self-help workplace action and the focus on locally available solutions.