Hi Chizzy

It has been a feature of technological development over many centuries that people have predicted doom and gloom in terms of employment prospects (for many disciplines).

But that doom and gloom has repeatedly failed to materialise and actually the demand for specialist skills and knowledge has continued to expand.

The need for occupational health and safety professionals is likely to be inversely proportionate to the competence of an organisation in preventing occupational ill health and injuries.

So, if all the workforce are upskilled in health and safety from Board level down to the shopfloor, then you should need less occupational health and safety professionals, but new challenges always turn up to mean that line managers are rarely up to date.

Now, I wrote "occupational ill health" before "injuries" as where the stats are recorded we know that the negative impacts of not effectively managing health and safety are MUCH more in terms of the personal and socio-economic costs of ill health than on accidents.

One of the issues that follows is where those costs fall in terms of the relationship between e.g. Governments and the organisations who create the risks and the subsequent costs.

If the organisations do not have to pay a proportionate amount of the costs of occupational ill health, then they may not adequately focus on the occupational health risks, leaving it to Governments, heathcare agencies and individuals to bear the burden of the costs.

In turn that means that the demand for occupational health and safety professionals may depend signficantly on the regulatory regime in any geography along with "stakeholder" influences e.g. the attitude of shareholders, customers and others.

For example, if a UK purchaser of clothes from a supplier in a developing nation says that it will not tolerate workers being exposed to high levels of respirable and inhalable levels of cotton dust, then a manufacturer in a developing nation may be under much greater pressure to manage risks, which might not result in ill health until months, years or decades after their worker has left their employment. 

In turn that UK purchaser's decisions may be impacted by the attitudes of its customers. I can choose not to buy from suppliers who do not influence better workplace standards and increasingly consumers do precisely this.

There will always be some form of interaction between equipment and persons. Some of it will be planned, some unplanned, i.e. the unexpected problem. The health and safety person/team can work with the company to ensure that the planned interaction is as safe as it can be made (and this will include the potential for health issues). Much more difficult is to plan for the unplanned! With safety, trying to assess the potential for the unexpected will be difficult enough. Now consider trying to plan for the unknown health effect of a new chemical process, or biological hazard (think SARS-CoV-2!) where the hazards of the chemical(s) or micro-organisms will vary during use/presence and where the consequences may not become apparent (or even known about) for some considerable time, possibly years. As Prof. Brian Cox has written: ‘In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.’  In my own field I am frequently having to amend my views/position as new information comes to light about how the skin (and the body) interacts with a chemical composition. I still have reservations about the extent to which AI will be able to replace the human ability to react to totally unexpected situations and the unpredictability of human reactions, both physical and emotive, to new situations. So I think that there will be a need for a human presence in the health and safety field for many years to come.