King's College London

In December Occupational Medicine published an article 'Improving recruitment to occupational health professions through highlighting intrinsic rewards' by Antonina Semkina, Caroline Norrie, Rekha Elaswarapu, Ian Kessler, Jo Moriarty, Annette Boaz, Jill Manthorpe, and Alec Knight. The paper is one of the outputs (along with a report and a poster presentation) of the larger project “Exploring the awareness and attractiveness of Occupational Health (OH) careers: perspectives of trainee doctors, nurses, OH trainees, OH career leavers” completed earlier this year.

The article aims to identify factors that make Occupational Health (OH) an attractive field of employment for doctors and nurses in order to aid recruitment. The authors conducted a qualitative study comparing the views of 13 OH nurses and doctors and 45 students and professionals from other medical and nursing fields across the UK, about what makes OH an attractive career. Both groups highly valued the work-life balance offered by OH work. In addition, people working in OH talked extensively about more intrinsic rewards—the opportunity to be impactful, to enjoy job variety and to practise preventative approaches. The authors concluded that the intrinsic rewards need to be advertised more widely to appeal to potential recruits who are ‘a good fit’ with OH and who will be committed to the field.

The project led to the development of another Occupational Health-related study: Review of Occupational Health (OH) and well-being service provision for the South London Local Authorities’ employees, currently in progress. There is also another article currently under review.

This publication

Semkina, A., Norrie, C., Elaswarapu, R., Kessler, I., Moriarty, J., Boaz, A., Manthorpe, J. and Knight, A. (2024) 'Improving recruitment to occupational health professions through highlighting intrinsic rewards', Occupational Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqae108