[Sick leave risk factors in a sample of women employed in the public sector. The SEMM study].

OMS reports describe an increase of levels of sickness leaves (SL) at work in all industrialized countries in last decades. Aims of this study are to assess incidence of SL from work in a sample of women public employees and to identify significant factors, among individual, behavioural, familiar, occupational and work strain related. The survey took place between April 1992 and December 1998.

["The Italian decree 195/2006 on the protection of workers against risks arising from noise"].

The Italian decree 195/2006 incorporates the European Directive 2003/10/CE on the minimum health and safety requirements regarding the exposure of workers to the risks arising from physical agents (noise). It is rather different to previous decree 277/1991, particularly as regard of the new exposure limit value and the elimination of annex VI and VII. We discus here only two aspects that we consider relevant and quite critical: 1) The calculation of the exposure limit values as noise equivalent level: it is a method that underestimates the potential damage of impulsive noise, so the risk evaluation remains quite inaccurate.

[Research and formal demonstration of evidence of efficiency in occupational medicine].

There is an increasing pressure on occupational health professionals to ensure that their practice is based on a quality standard and an evidence of appropriateness. The efficacy-effectiveness of their activity strictly depends on their intellectual and professional integrity, their technical and legal competence, but also on the quality of the relations with the company organisation they are able to establish. We asked to some occupational physician when they considered their interventions in the workplace to be efficacious.

[Job stress in the service industry. Evaluation of the Italian version of the Job Content Questionnaire].

Background: Recent changes in work organization have greatly expanded the service industry, where stress perception appears to be the major factor of discomfort. Job stress remains a critical issue in occupational exposure assessments.

Objectives: To assess the compliance and the consistency of the three major constructs (Psychological Job Demand (PJD); Decision Latitude (DL); and Social Support at Work (SSW)) of the Italian version of the Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ) adopted in the MOPSY and JACE studies and their gender-specific distributions in a large sample of civil servant in northern Italy.