Medical surveillance of health care workers with psychiatric disorder

: Medical surveillance of health care workers with psychiatric disorder represents a hard challenge for the company occupational physician. The critical matters are: which tools to use, which job suitability criteria to adopt and how to adapt the occupational environment to these workers. An integrated mental health surveillance program was developed by the Department of Occupational Medicine at S. Chiara University Hospital in Pisa, in order to better assist and treat hospital staff suffering from psychiatric disorders in a preventive medical setting. Our experience seems to indicate that an Occupational Medicine setting can offer effective psychiatric support that is better accepted and tolerated by health care workers and that this approach can properly help occupational physician during medical surveillance.