Occupational Safety and Health in the Republic of Macedonia

Introduction
The Republic of Macedonia is a small and developing country. The main orientation of the country is to become a member of the European Union and to implement the most relevant instruments that guarantee workplace safety and promotion of the workers’ health. The goal of this paper is to present a review of the occupational safety and health (OSH) situation in the country through summarizing the existing OSH conditions.

Methods
A systematic review of the available policy documents and research papers, including questionnaire based surveillance for prioritization of the further needed actions

Results
OSH ranks very high on the political agenda: the new OSH Law was adopted in 2007 and the tripartite Governmental council was nominated in 2010. Currently, there is no OSH strategy, program nor national OSH authority. The national system is still divided between two competent ministries – for labor and for health. There are 14 authorized companies for safety at work and 19 for occupational health, which are respectively responsible for the OSH activities for more than 75497 active business entities and 649575 employees. The total number of professionals, including safety inspectors is less than 200. There is a national institute for occupational medicine but there is no respective safety entity. There is no formal education for safety engineers or other training for safety experts; the specialization in occupational medicine lasts 4 year. There are a few adopted safety standards (noise, vibration). Many by-law documents are more than 50 years old (TLVs, BEIs for chemicals, heat-stress indicators etc.). The work related accidents rate in 2010 is 131,9/100.000 workers; occupational disease incidence rate is the lowest in comparison with other European countries (0.2/100.000 workers).

Discussion
An integrated OSH system should be developed in the Republic of Macedonia with infrastructure capable for implementation of the national programme. OSH network should be strengthening.