Chairing the ICOH Mid-Term Meeting in Florence
At the ICOH Mid-Term Meeting in Florence, Dr Minha chaired its committee on unemployment, job insecurity and health, shaping policy across five continents.
In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Minha travelled to Florence for the Mid-Term Meeting of the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH), held in preparation for the Commission’s triennial World Congress. Founded in Milan in 1906, ICOH is the world’s leading international scientific society in occupational health, with some 2,000 members across more than 100 countries and formal working relationships with the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization.
Dr Minha attended in a leading role, as Chair of the ICOH Scientific Committee on Unemployment, Job Insecurity and Health, chairing the committee’s meeting during the gathering. It is a field that rarely makes headlines but shapes the health of millions: the growing evidence that unemployment, insecure work and the fear of losing one’s livelihood are themselves powerful determinants of physical and mental health, with consequences that ripple far beyond the workplace.
The committee’s work centred on shared policymaking, protecting workers facing job insecurity and unemployment, and identifying environmental hazards in the workplace. The policy documentation prepared through that work went on to be implemented across workforces on five continents, a reach that Dr Minha reflects she sometimes has to remind herself of.
Occupational and disability medicine is a thread that runs through everything she does. It is why, at Curaidh Clinic, a patient’s working life is never treated as separate from their health, from how the demands of work can drive illness, to how illness reshapes a person’s ability to work, and what it takes to bridge the two.
