:: About the Department
Department of Occupational Health and Safety (A Brief History)
Due to rapid development of Occupational Health and Safety in Thailand, the number of industrial factories were considerably increased leading to an increase of technologies, equipments, machines as well as pollutant emissions in the workplace. Problems of air pollution in the working environment such as dust, soot, smoke, odor, toxic gas, heat, noise and other germs could result in occupational diseases, accidents, disabilities and death of workers.
In 1929, the occupational health and safety at work was officially developed under the cooperation of technical expert, private enterprises and govermental sectors to promote safe workplace environment. Industry Act, the first regislation related to industry, was used to protect workers' right about safety in the workplace.
Subsequently, Ministry of Public Health realized that the adverse health effects from pollutants would have an impact on well being of people, Public Health Act was promulgated in 1934 and later was improved and enforced in 1941. The act stated that health and hygiene of all workers should be protected in the workplaces.
However, occupational health in that period was not seriously emphasized on protection of workers' health and well being. Forcasting the importance of occupational health and safety at work, Public Health Ministry sent some personnels to be trained abroad. When they returned back, the occupational health programme was set up in the department of sanitary engineering in 1965 and later changing up into department of health, Occupational Health Section,Ministry of Public Health.
Owing to the above problems, department of occupational health was established on August 8, 1970 in Faculty of Public Health, Mahidol University. The department provided Bachelor degree of science programme in Public Health specializing in Occupational Health following the trend of Ministry of Public Health. Later, govermental organizations and private sectors especcially industrial factories need a lot of bachelors in this field, the programme was improved to serve needs of users and was finally changed into Bachelor of science (Public Health) specializing in Occupational Health and Safety. The Department of Occupational Health and Safety has provided the programme for 38 years and produced 985 Bachelors in this field.
In 1982, Department of Occupational health and safety arranged the Master of Science programme in Industrial Hygiene and Safety to serve needs of governmental organizations, state enterprises and private sectors to develop their personnels in terms of knowledge about planning, investigation, measurement, evaluation, control in occupational health and safety and capacity of doing research in related fields.
Since the Department of Occupational Health and Safety was established to the present time, seven persons were taken up the position of the department head as follows :
1. Asso.Prof.Dr. Malinee Wongpanich from 1969 to 1988
2. Assist.Prof.Dr. Prawit Jongwisan from 1988 to 1990
3. Asso.Prof.Dr. Chalermchai Chaikittiporn from 1990 to 1996
4. Asso.Prof.Dr. Witaya Yoosook from 1996 to 2000
5. Asso.Prof.Dr. Chalermchai Chaikittiporn from 2000 to 2002
6. Asso.Prof.Dr. Witaya Yoosook from 2002 to 2006