OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY AS AN AREA SAFETY ENGINEERING

The publication deals with the issue of safety engineering and occupational health and safety interms of the areas of knowledge, education and science. Safety engineering is an area of knowledge,an area of education (field of higher studies), an area of science (a new discipline in the fieldof engineering and technical sciences). On the other hand, occupational health and safety is anarea of knowledge (e.g.: occupational health and safety service, legal information, standardizationinformation, industry information), an area of education (e.g.: training in the field of occupationalhealth and safety, occupation of an occupational health and safety technician, field of higherstudies, postgraduate studies), yet it is not an autonomous area of science as an independentscientific discipline (it has a chance of becoming a research area or scientific specialty in thediscipline of safety engineering). The scope of the publication comprises selected aspects of safetyengineering, selected aspects of occupational health and safety and a review of requirements in thefield of occupational risk assessment. The research and analyses included publicly available datain the field of higher education and science system (including: POL-on system, RAD-on system,Polish Science database, website of the Council of Scientific Excellence): universities offering fieldsof study in safety engineering and occupational health and safety, entities and persons conductingresearch activities in safety engineering, entities authorized to award doctoral degrees andhabilitated doctor degrees in safety engineering, persons declaring scientific specialties in safetyengineering and occupational health and safety. In the higher education and science system, thefollowing were identified: two entities authorized to award doctoral degrees and habilitated doctordegrees in safety engineering (the Fire University, the WSB University), nine entities conductingscientific activities in the discipline of safety engineering and 113 people conducting scientificactivities in the discipline of safety engineering (people with at least a doctoral degree, including13 people with the academic title of professor and 32 people with the academic degree of associateprofessor).