Sunday, November 11, 2007

Body@Work and a new professor of occupational health.


On Thursday November 8, Dr. Allard van der Beek held his inaugural address to accept his chair in occupational health. His address was preceded by a symposium reporting on the Body@Work project (http://www.bodyatwork.nl/), a collaboration between the EMGO institute (http://www.emgo.nl/) and TNO Quality of Life (http://www.tno.nl/content.cfm?context=overtno&content=overtnosub&laag1=32&item_id=59) to support an conduct research on physical activity, work and health.
Professor Allard van der Beek argued in favour of carefully planned and evaluated preventive occupational health care in order to develop better interventions and improve evidence-based practice. He further argued that such research to develop preventive occupational health interventions should be especially focussed on opening the ‘epidemiological black box’, i.e. to gain better understanding on why and how certain behaviours are associated with work disability, and on intervention mapping (http://www.interventionmapping.nl/), i.e. to carefully tailor interventions to specific needs and characteristics of the target population. Such research is dependent on multidisciplinary collaborations.Allard also completed his first marathon recently… http://evenementen.uitslagen.nl/2007/amsterdammarathon/details.php?t=nl&s=5002

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