Health Capacity of Employees

Reviewed Proceedings of Papers of the Scientific Conference

Health determines an individual's life in all activities and interests, including the possibility and ability to work. Work and health are in the mutual interaction. Work leads to social inclusion, financial self-sufficiency, finding confirmation of one's own usefulness or achieving personal ambitions. Work can have therapeutic effects, but at the same time it can have an adverse effect on health. Overlapping factors of work environment, alone or in combination with non-work influences, can lead to illnesses that temporarily or permanently exclude an employee from his or her profession. For these reasons, health enjoys fundamental legal protection as one of the most important values, not only in labour relations. One of the auxiliary tools to ensure the protection of the health of employees in labour relations is the assessment of health capacity for work. The purpose of the assessment of health capacity is to ensure only the performance of work for which the individual has health prerequisites. The issue of assessing the medical and mental capacity of employees for work is an interdisciplinary topic in which not only legal science is represented, but also medical departments or the field of public health. Although the pandemic period extended several legal aspects of the researched area with new theses, at the same time it made impossible for experts to meet directly for a personal exchange of knowledge and to discuss the presented opinions. Despite unfavorable circumstances, the Department of Labour Law and Social Security Law of the Faculty of Law of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice decided to proceed in the research of the grant project APVV-16-0002 Mental health in the workplace and assessment of health capacity of employee and to organize the electronic conference which held from 15th to 25th May 2020. The output of the international scientific conference is proceedings of scientific papers. The content of the reviewed proceedings of scientific papers declares the importance of addressing issues related to the protection of employees' health, not only from a legal point of view, but also in the context of its necessary interconnection with other scientific disciplines.