Collaborative Development for the Prevention of Occupational Accidents and Diseases

This chapter includes a brief history of the creation of our research group and the need for formative interventions in workers’ health. The traditional approaches to work health and safety are reductionist and top-down; interventions are performed by experts and focus on compliance with rules or reduction of elementary hazards, without involvement of and learning by actors. Aiming at overcoming these shortcomings, the workers’ health concept and movement in Brazil allowed for substantial advances from mere visible aspects to the understanding of interactions within organizations. Such considerable efforts further reveal the need for theoretical and conceptual improvement and pedagogic tools to include learning within interventions. To our group, the Change Laboratory (CL) method and Cultural–Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) represent a new paradigm as systemic view and a pedagogic contribution to interventions which aim at overcoming mere diagnosis and move toward transformation. R. A. G. Vilela (*) Department of Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil e-mail: ravilela@usp.br M. A. P. Querol Department of Agronomic Engineering, Federal University of Sergipe, São Cristóvão, SE, Brazil I. M. de Almeida Department of Public Health, Botucatu School of Medicine, São Paulo State University “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, Botucatu, SP, Brazil e-mail: ialmeida@fmb.unesp.br J. M. J. Filho Occupational Safety and Medicine Foundation Jorge Duprat Figueiredo – Fundacentro, Curitiba, PR, Brazil e-mail: jose.jackson@fundacentro.gov.br