Occupational health and safety as an area safety engineering

The publication deals with the issue of safety engineering and occupational health and safety in terms 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 field of engineering and technical sciences). On the other hand, occupational health and safety is an area of knowledge (e.g.: occupational health and safety service, legal information, standardization information, industry information), an area of education (e.g.: training in the field of occupational health and safety, occupation of an occupational health and safety technician, field of higher studies, postgraduate studies), yet it is not an autonomous area of science as an independent scientific discipline (it has a chance of becoming a research area or scientific specialty in the discipline of safety engineering). The scope of the publication comprises selected aspects of safety engineering, selected aspects of occupational health and safety and a review of requirements in the field of occupational risk assessment. The research and analyses included publicly available data in 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 fields of study in safety engineering and occupational health and safety, entities and persons conducting research activities in safety engineering, entities authorized to award doctoral degrees and habilitated doctor degrees in safety engineering, persons declaring scientific specialties in safety engineering and occupational health and safety. In the higher education and science system, the following were identified: two entities authorized to award doctoral degrees and habilitated doctor degrees in safety engineering (the Fire University, the WSB University), nine entities conducting scientific activities in the discipline of safety engineering and 113 people conducting scientific activities in the discipline of safety engineering (people with at least a doctoral degree, including 13 people with the academic title of professor and 32 people with the academic degree of associate professor).