EU-OSHA visualisation tool on safety and health of Europe’s ageing workforce

EU-OSHA recently launched a visualisation tool designed to allow easy and quick access to the results of its three-year project “Safer and healthier work at any age”. The European Commission concluded a delegation agreement with the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) to carry out a pilot project entitled ‘Safer and healthier work at any age — occupational safety and health (OSH) in the context of an ageing workforce’. This was based on a decision and request of the European Parliament, whose objective was to further investigate possible ways of improving the safety and health of older people at work, as the ageing of the workforce will have a serious financial impact on workers, employers and taxpayers.

Thus, the project aimed to assess the prerequisites for OSH strategies and systems to take account of an ageing workforce and improve risk prevention and health protection for all throughout working life. The key results of the project are presented, including data on demographics, employment, working conditions, and health, as well as examples of OSH policies across Europe addressing the challenges of an ageing workforce.  This data visualisation tool presents the key findings of the project and allows users to explore the data in an interactive way by comparing countries and searching for policies, strategies and programmes, among other possibilities.

The issue of the ageing workforce is represented using the ‘Age pyramid’, that is, an interactive graph showing historical data and the projections for the EU, provided by Eurostat. Next to this, some important figures show that this issue is closely related to OSH and working conditions.

The country insights section provides country specific information on initiatives to address the ageing of the workforce, including healthy life years expectancy, population age structure development, employment rate, workplace risk assessments data etc…

See more in the visualisation tool