Alicante, April 8, 2022. On March 29, the ‘Meeting by Laboralia’ took place at Feria Valencia, an event promoted by the Valencian Institute of Safety and Health at Work (INVASSAT) that addressed the strengths and weaknesses of the system prevention after two years of pandemic. Manuel Rodríguez, Aludium’s doctor at the Alicante plant, together with Grupo Antolin Autotrim, moderated the first panel entitled ‘The synergy of the pandemic in healthy habits in the company’. During this colloquium, in which Aludium participated, the difficulties encountered by the members to promote health in their workers and what were the measures adopted to solve them were discussed. As a general idea, Manuel Rodríguez highlighted “the information overload and social distancing” they experienced, which forced them to “adopt new communication and social relations strategies.” In addition, he added that they had to “reinvent health promotion activities by making them more informative than participatory”.
In recent years, since the arrival of the pandemic, the occupational risk prevention, safety and health at work sector has played a crucial role. The meeting brought together more than 400 Occupational Risk Prevention professionals from large companies and public and private institutions to value how the pandemic was managed to guarantee occupational health and well-being in companies and organizations. As Elvira Ródenas, general director of Work, Welfare and Occupational Safety, director of INVASSAT and president of the Laboralia contest, pointed out, the objective of this meeting was “to share experiences of the pandemic in order to learn from what has been experienced and develop strategies for the future” . As Rodríguez stated, “Laboralia is a fair in which preventionists are given the opportunity to share the good practices developed and update ourselves on occupational risk prevention”.
During the sessions, Rodríguez explained that “at Aludium, since the beginning of the pandemic, measures have been established to improve the health of workers based on information and the prevention of Sars-CoV-2 infection and they have worked to prevent the spread of the virus within of the factory establishing individual and collective hygiene measures and barrier measures such as the use of masks and face shields.” In addition, “the hours of the medical service were extended, doubling our presence to attend to queries from both the company and the workers. The pandemic was also closely monitored and health promotion campaigns were established according to the current situation, and we collaborated with the administration in the investigation and monitoring of cases and close contacts”, he concluded.
