HEALTH AND SAFETY LEGISLATION

Comparison of Irish Health and Safety Legislation with US Health and Safety Legislation



Comparison of Irish Health and Safety Legislation with US Health and Safety Legislation

Introduction

The Health and Safety Authority is the Irish national organization which is responsible for controlling and operating health and safety in Ireland. The Health and Safety Authority is a state sponsored organisation established under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work and he organisation directly reports to the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The organisation has overall responsibility for the Authority on the administration and enforcement of health and safety in Ireland. Every workplace and other entities are monitored by the organization to ensure the protection of health and safety of the people. The authority monitors the environment to ensure compliance with of health and safety legislation. The same authority provides training, educate people and carry out research on health and safety related issues. The organization is the centre of information which supplements all the relevant information regarding the issue.

Discussion and Analysis

Public health services in the US

The roots of the U.S. Public Health Service, which to this day is often important to communication efforts surrounding public health issues, date back to 1798 when Congress passed—and President John Adams signed—the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seaman. A year later the legislation was extended to include those serving in the U.S. Navy, both actions reflective of the belief that the health of the commercial seamen and navy men were integral to the economic and defence interests of the nation (Curran, 1993). The mission of the Marine Hospital Service, as it became known, remained largely unchanged for nearly 100 years (Bermann & Mavroidis, 2006).

According to Historian John L. Parascandola, a series of problems within the service led to a reorganization and centralization in 1870 with its first supervising surgeon (later U.S. Surgeon General), John Maynard Woodworth, appointed a year later. Woodworth, who served until his death in 1879, instituted a military model for the reorganized system, requiring the physician staff to be in uniform, giving them ranks evocative of the military, and creating career professionals who could be assigned to various hospitals within the system as events warranted. Eventually formalized by legislation in 1889 as the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, it remains one of the uniformed services of the United States and today employs more than 6,000 health professionals in a variety of health care-related fields (Curran, 1993).

Early on, Supervising Surgeon General Wood-worth believed the mission of the Marine Hospital Service should expand beyond the health and medical needs of commercial seamen and U.S. Navy personnel, a belief that was no doubt reinforced by burgeoning health and medical needs throughout the United States that continue today. An early example of those burgeoning needs spurred Congress into action after a yellow fever epidemic raged throughout the Mississippi Valley in 1878, killing an estimated 20,000 people. Congress enacted the National Quarantine Act that year, delegating responsibility for disease control through quarantine ...