Working life and occupational health are going through major changes. The core task of occupational health is to cooperate with employers to maintain their personnel’s ability to work. Our particular duty is to help employers avoid work-related diseases. Work ability plays a critical role in the success of both companies and society as a whole.
The operating environment of occupational health has faced significant changes in recent years:
- in 2022, occupational physiotherapists became occupational health professionals, allowing employees to consult an occupational physiotherapist without a separate referral
- in summer 2023, occupational health and safety legislation was amended to include the important questions in working life – ageing and mental stress – in employers’ risk assessments
- nearly all wellbeing services counties have adopted the specialist care and occupational health cooperation model (TYÖOTE model in Finnish: https://www.ttl.fi/teemat/tyoterveys/tyoterveyshuolto/tyoote-toimintamalli)
- the pension premium rate model for large companies was reformed in early 2024 (Varma’s article in Finnish: The reform of the premium rate model encourages earlier return to work).
Pihlajalinna Occupational Health Care is committed to producing high-quality occupational health services with great cost and health impacts in compliance with law and regulations. This promotes Pihlajalinna’s strategic objective to develop impactful and responsible services for our customers. With personal customers, the impact of our services is measured by health benefits achieved best by following the latest clinical guidelines. Because an occupational health customer is a customer organisation, our aim is to help the customer’s operations become more cost-effective through healthy and happy personnel.
In 2024, Pihlajalinna Occupational Health Care endeavours to become even more impactful. As part of this work, we will give all our customers access to our new, cost-effective services. These include a sickness absence policy recommended based on research and best practices as well as the digital assessment of the need for care. We are also updating our account management system to serve you even better than before.
The aim of these changes is to provide better services and develop more impactful occupational health cooperation to support the work ability and competitiveness of our customer organisations. We will inform you of our new services and policies in more detail in the spring.
Best regards,
Henni Hyytiä-Ilmonen
Chief Occupational Health Physician
Pihlajalinna – Occupational Health for All of Finland