[Risk assessment and its appropriateness supporting the physician in the certification of a suspected occupational disease.].

Objectives: The topic of appropriateness was defined as the new frontier of development of health interventions. RH Brook in an Editorial published in the BMJ in 1994 defines the appropriateness "… an intervention for which the expected benefits are greater (with a sufficient margin) the possible negative consequences … excluding economic considerations". In workplaces the goal of appropriateness should cover not only the actions of health surveillance and health protocols, but also and primarily all stages of the risk assessment process.

Usage and effectiveness of e-learning courses for continuous medical education.

The paper describes the results of an e-learning experimental project for Continuous Medical Education (CME) in Occupational Medicine in terms of: extent of the e-learning courses usage by the healthcare personnel, knowledge acquisition and satisfaction. 11 courses have been available for 11 months during which 2,034 users all over Italy enrolled in 5,183 courses with a success percentage of 72% and a significant difference between test scores performed before and after attending the e-learning courses. Also user's satisfaction, inspected through a questionnaire, has provided good results.

Development of an e-learning system for occupational medicine: usability issues.

The aim of the present paper is to describe the process of developing an e-learning system for continuous medical education in the field of occupational medicine, with special focus on usability. The following steps are described: the needs analysis of the potential users; the prototype of the system that has been set up; the usability evaluation of the prototype by a sample of ten users; the analysis of the potential improvements; the evaluation of the revised system. The results of the usability tests point out that investing in improving usability was useful, even when they have not been recommended as mandatory.