Rationale of the 5th EOH Forum

The WHO strategy of “Health for All” in 1980 gave rise to the healthy settings movement, with the 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion furthering development of the many strategies towards it. Since then, the concept of sustainable development also picked up pace. To date, health promotion and sustainable development have become guiding principles of public health systems. Countries have made various progress in promoting healthy settings while they look to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. However, all efforts have been stymied by the unexpected interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The WHO defines healthy settings as “places or social contexts where people in daily activities in which environmental, organizational, and personal factors interact to affect health and well-being.”

In the spirit of promoting healthy settings, this Forum focuses on healthy workplaces to help all strive for a common future of imminent recovery from the pandemic. Across countries and industries, two of the most confronting challenges towards making work healthy now are:

• defining the post-pandemic workplace, as unfamiliar or exacting needs arise when a disaster of the same scale as the pandemic confronts industries; and,

• assimilating best practices of non-healthcare workplaces learnt over the course of facing the pandemic

People actively contribute to the creation of a setting. Thus, challenges are also addressable by the people in that setting through many forms of strategic action, among them environmental and occupational health (EOH) measures. As the 5th EOH Forum aims to explore the two challenges above, its theme is “Environmental and Occupational Health Towards the Promotion of Workplaces as Healthy Settings”.