First health and safety event in Romania a huge success

13 October 2010

More than 300 delegates attended Romania’s first ever conference for health and safety professionals in September, making the event a huge success.

‘Working in partnership for a safer and healthier workplace’, a national conference jointly organised by the Romanian Association of Health and Safety Professionals (ARSSM) and IOSH, took place at the Rin Grand Hotel in Bucharest on 23 and 24 September.

Speakers included Valentin Moraru, secretary of state of the Romanian Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Protection; representatives from the Labour Inspectorate; the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) and the Romanian National Focal Point alongside speakers from the UK.

Malcolm McIntyre, chairman of the IOSH New Accession Countries (NAC) initiative, opened the conference, followed by the secretary of state who pledged the government’s full support to the ARSSM initiative. IOSH President John Holden also gave an opening speech together with the general director of ARSSM, Adrian Campean. Terry Taylor, head of the Information Unit of EU-OSHA, addressed the audience on the Euro Maintenance campaign and IOSH policy and technical director Richard Jones introduced ENSHPO and its European certification standard EurOSH(M).

‘Safety today, not tomorrow’ was the motto of the press conference held with live TV coverage, where John Holden, ARSSM president Dan Andreescu, Malcolm McIntyre, Valentin Moraru, Paul Popescu of the NAC initiative, Adrian Campean and Terry Taylor were interviewed by press journalists.

Day two of the conference saw delegates divided into six different workshops to hold discussions on traffic risk management, Euro Maintenance, psychosocial risks, communication techniques, risk management and accident investigation methods. These sessions were led by British and Romanian specialists in each of the respective areas and will result in six codes of practice to be published and used by practitioners in Romania.

We’d like to congratulate the ARSSM on the success of the conference, which proved immensely popular with great feedback from delegates and speakers alike. Live TV coverage of the press conference and a number of newspaper articles, including two in Romania’s national press, helped to make this a step forward in raising the profile of health and safety professionals in Romania.