This paper concerns the background and the experiences from an advanced course with a practical orientation, which has been offered for ten years to persons in Swedish occupational health services (OHS) who have specialized in the psychosocial domain. The main features of the course are described, e.g. target groups, aims, scope and assessment, forms of instruction, and content. The effectiveness of the course has been continuously tested and evaluated. On the basis of the evaluations, the paper ends with a discussion on the relationship between a course of this kind and the economic environment that may be revealed only during a time of relatively rapid change to a country's economic system. A conclusion is that the effectiveness of this form of training should be looked at carefully and reconsidered continuously, as the OHS psychologists are confronted with different psychosocial problems from time to time. The experiences gained from this course could be of value to similar attempts in other countries.
The focus of this article is the link between organizational change and individual working conditions. In some organizational development projects health aspects may be left to chance, in others they may be to some extent respected, and in still others they are the main theme of the process and direction of change. Along this line, the author presents and discusses a number of Swedish cases. The analysis aims at emphasizing a necessary characteristic of occupational health experts, namely, to be sensitive to the differences between the goals of various projects in organizational development. Preventive work must be based on a careful identification of the sort of health aspects that are overlooked in every effort at organizational change.
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