Outline
This HESSME Guide is aimed at people who run small enterprises. It is part of an initiative to promote Good Practice in Health, Environment and Safety Management in Enterprises (GP HESSME) throughout Europe

'Workplace Well-being' will help organisations go beyond the lowest legal requirements in workplace and keep them ahead of their competitors. It is ideal for organisations who already have quality systems, and are looking how to incorporate all the health and environment standards that are now emerging.

Businesses have to be both competitive and compliant with an increasingly complex array of laws and standards about the environment, safety and health. Instead of making this a complex matter, it is really a matter of making your business more effective. And to be effective, you have to be healthy. The same applies to business.

Health is defined in WHO's Constitution as 'a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity'.

Workplace Health is a state of continual improvement in health, environment and safety well-being and not merely the absence of occupational disease and accidents

This HESSME Guide to 'Workplace Well-being' brings together the best practice from a range of subject areas, including health promotion, accident prevention, occupational health, public health, cleaner production, environmental management, and sustainable development. These best practices create a set of HESSME principles, which are used to determine the key elements in the quality-based system.

HESSME integrates Health, Environment and Safety into a single quality system, suitable for a small company. The HESSME Guide sets out a Health, Environment and Safety system based on the fundamentals of quality systems. Quality systems are auditable systems that provide for continual improvement. Quality management is being introduced into a wide range of organisations including Occupational Health Services . The Guide develops international and European standards for environmental management, and new ILO standards for occupational health and safety into unified action.

©World Health Organisation 2002
Authors: Dr Charlie Clutterbuck & Dr Bogdan Baranski