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Lifestyle, preventive actions and identification of for instance ergonomic risk factors has traditionally been work focused by occupational health services. There has lately been a shift towards workplace health promotion. The aim of this article is to give physiotherapists an understanding of what workplace health promotion is and how it can be implemented in health and safety at work. WHO has defined health as something more than absence of disease. Aaron Antonovsky’s theory on salutogenesis focuses on the positive aspects of health, and this is the basis for health promotion activities. Health promotion may be defined as the process of enabling individuals, groups and organizations to increase their control over the determinants of health and thereby increase their health. To create health promoting workplaces it is important to focus on the whole workplace as a setting and the effects that may have on health, and not only on individuals’ behaviour and/or groups of workers that may be at particular risk of developing disease. The consequence of this is that one has to work on both an individual and a group or organizational level. It is also important that management and employees are involved in this work. The occupational health service and physiotherapists need necessary competence in initiating and guiding health promoting processes in which surveys and interventions focus on the main processes and production in the enterprises, and not only on supportive processes such as lifestyle, rehabilitation and sick-leave work.

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