An Investigation on Academists Dutting in the Occupational Health and Safety Program of Universities

Abstract

Occupational Health and Safety is at every stage of our life. It can be considered as protecting the health of employees and providing a safe working environment in the businesses that come to our mind. The purpose of occupational health and safety; Prevention of work accidents and occupational diseases is to ensure the full social, mental and physical well-being of the employees. In addition, it is aimed to gain occupational health and safety awareness by adding the occupational health and safety course to the curriculum in universities.  OHS Specialist profession has emerged with the need of professionals in the field of Occupational Health and Safety over time. At the universities, the Occupational Health and Safety program is opened in associate and undergraduate degrees, and it is aimed to meet the needs of experts in the sector. Academicians in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering faculties and technical education faculties attended the course since there were no trained professors in the establishment of the programs. Over time, teachers who have the OHS expertise or OHS trainer certificate have entered the course and the academics trained in the field have started to be trained with a master's and a doctorate. Today, the number of proficient teachers is low. There is still no specific specialty. In this study, it is a study to examine the academic careers, specialties, demographic structures and whether they want to continue their academic careers in the field of OHS by academicians who provide OHS education at universities. The data obtained were analyzed with the "IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0" program. The reliability of the study was provided by finding the value of "Cronbach Alpha (α)" 0.623. We see that the majority of academicians are male, married, C class certificate, lecturers. We see that the respondents want to get the title of associate professor in the field of Occupational Health and Safety and think that the OHS Program should be in the engineering faculty. As a result; We see that there are a few of the teachers working in the field of Occupational Safety. According to these results, we can say that it will take time to train professors and professors in the field of Occupational Health and Safety.