Malta has opened public consultation on its first national occupational health and safety strategy, a five-year plan that will set the country’s workplace safety priorities. The consultation was launched on Thursday during a conference titled “Shaping OHS together”, organised by the Occupational Health and Safety Authority.

The strategy will concentrate on three areas: accident prevention, worker protection and emerging challenges in the workplace. It is the first attempt to pull Malta’s workplace safety priorities into a single national plan with defined goals.

Infrastructure Minister Jonathan Attard said consultation and collaboration with all stakeholders would deliver on an electoral commitment aimed at safeguarding workers. Attard’s portfolio covers infrastructure, planning and employment and the OHSA falls under his responsibility.

OHSA chief executive Josianne Cutajar said the strategy had to be grounded in the actual needs of the country and the local labour market, with clear targets and an achievable action plan. The emphasis she said, was on real conditions rather than general aspirations.

The authority is the national body responsible for occupational health and safety in Malta. It was established by the Occupational Health and Safety Authority Act XXVII of 2000, with a remit to promote and safeguard the physical, psychological and social well-being of all workers across every workplace and to enforce health and safety legislation.

The new strategy follows recent OHSA work on psychological and mental well-being at work. The authority ran a national campaign to raise awareness of mental health in the workplace and to tackle work-related stress, bullying and harassment. It has also gathered data on psychological risk factors affecting the workplace, the kind of emerging risk the longer-term plan is now meant to address alongside the authority’s established work on physical accident prevention and worker protection.