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- Editorial The First Evaluation of Workers’ General Health Examination in Korea
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Eun-A Kim
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Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 2017;29:1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40557-017-0158-z
Published online: February 9, 2017
Occupational Safety and Health Search Institute, Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, Ulsan, Republic of Korea 
• Received: January 18, 2017 • Accepted: February 8, 2017
© The Author(s). 2017
Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Workers health examination was introduced as an employers’ duty, in 1953, when the labor standard act was enacted. Since then, workers health examination have been one of the most important occupational health service to protect and promote workers’ health. It went to two different system in 1973, one is the workers’ special health examination (WSHE), which covered who is exposed to specific health risks at work, and the other is workers’ general health examination (WGHE), which covered who does not.
Since 1980, the Korean government started a health screening system for the general population. There has been several remodelings, including the schedule by age group, target diseases, and test items based on the comprehensive study, to evaluate the relevance and the effectiveness of the system [1]. Although workers’ health examination is one of the screening systems for the working population, it has never been evaluated for the effectiveness as a medical screening system, because the mission of workers’ health examination is not only medical screening, but it is expected to play a role as a health management tool. The necessity of the evaluation went unheard. At this moment, we did not known how the WGHE was successful, what the most important achievement of WGHE is, or whether we have to maintain this system.
In this special series, 4 papers draw the general outline, effectiveness, inequality and the practical use of the WGHE. These papers deal with the basic information and the evaluation of some key elements of WGHE that are essential to value the system, which might be a meaningful start of the evaluation and revision of workers’ health examination systems. Further, a detailed analysis regarding workers’ health examination must to be done.
The author declares that he/she has no competing interests.
This editorial do not need consent for publication because it is not about human data. There are no related row data or material. There are no fund for this editorial.
I have read and understood your journal’s policies on copyright, ethics, etc., and believe that neither the manuscript nor the study violates any of these.
- 1. Lee WH, Lee SY. National Health Screening Program of Korea. J Korean Med Assoc 2010;53:363–370. 10.5124/jkma.2010.53.5.363.Article
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