Workers' health: From diagnosis to formative intervention

Abstract

This chapter includes a brief history of the creation of our research group and the need for formative interventions in workers' health. The traditional approaches to work health and safety are reductionist and top-down; interventions are performed by experts and focus on compliance with rules or reduction of elementary hazards, without involvement of and learning by actors. Aiming at overcoming these shortcomings, the workers' health concept and movement in Brazil allowed for substantial advances from mere visible aspects to the understanding of interactions within organizations. Such considerable efforts further reveal the need for theoretical and conceptual improvement and pedagogic tools to include learning within interventions. To our group, the Change Laboratory (CL) method and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) represent a new paradigm as systemic view and a pedagogic contribution to interventions which aim at overcoming mere diagnosis and move toward transformation.