The purpose of this paper was to review the problems relating to Korea’s occupational health services and suggest ways to improve them. Korea can be classified as a welfare state type of conservative corporatism partially interwoven with liberalism. While experiencing compressed economic growth, the economic sectors of developed (excess areas) and developing (deficient areas) countries are interwoven. Therefore, it is necessary to perfect conservative corporatism along with a complementary reinforcement of liberal contents and to apply a multilayered approach focusing on complementing the deficient areas. It is essential to form a national representative indicator related to occupational health, and a strategy for selection and concentration is needed. The proposed central indicator is the occupational health coverage rate (OHCR), which is the number of workers who have applied for mandatory occupational health services under the Occupational Safety and Health Act in the numerator with the total working population in the denominator. This paper proposes ways to raise the OHCR, which is currently at the level of 25%–40%, to 70%–80%, which is the level of Japan, Germany, and France. To achieve this target, it is necessary to focus on small businesses and vulnerable workers. This is an area of market failure and requires the active input of community-oriented public resources. For access to larger workplaces, the marketability of services should be strengthened and personal intervention using digital health resources should be actively attempted. Taking a national perspective, work environment improvement committees with tripartite (labor, management, and government) participation for improvement of the working environment need to be established at the center and in the regions. Through this, prevention funds linked to industrial accident compensation and prevention could be used efficiently. A national chemical substance management system must be established to monitor the health of workers and the general public.

Citations

Citations to this article as recorded by  

• Precarious employment and the onset of depressive symptoms and problematic alcohol use in middle-aged or older workers: A Korean longitudinal study (2006–2022)
  Seong-Uk Baek, Yu-Min Lee, Jong-Uk Won, Jin-Ha Yoon
  Social Science & Medicine.2024; 357: 117170.     CrossRef
• Association of precarious employment with depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation among female workers: Findings from a nationwide longitudinal study in Korea
  Seong-Uk Baek, Yu-Min Lee, Jin-Ha Yoon
  Journal of Affective Disorders.2024; 351: 931.     CrossRef
• Association between precarious employment and the onset of depressive symptoms in men and women: a 13-year longitudinal analysis in Korea (2009–2022)
  Seong-Uk Baek, Jong-Uk Won, Yu-Min Lee, Jin-Ha Yoon
  Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences.2024;[Epub]     CrossRef
• Multidimensional typologies of precarious employment and their relationships with mental well-being in Korean wageworkers: A latent class analysis based on the Korean Working Conditions Survey (2020–2021)
  Seong-Uk Baek, Jong-Uk Won, Jin-Ha Yoon
  Preventive Medicine.2023; 177: 107787.     CrossRef