Integrating social protection and occupational health services: A scoping review

Abstract Human health is shaped by physiological factors and by social, environmental, behavioural, and political conditions. Annually, occupational risks are a major contributor to a significant number of avoidable deaths and disability‐adjusted life‐years. Addressing such determinants requires action beyond the health sector, with increasing recognition of the value of multisectoral approaches to achieving health equity. Social protection and occupational health services systems both address these determinants of health and share a public health objective: preventing occupational injuries and diseases, supporting healthcare access, and facilitating rehabilitation. Among social protection schemes, social health protection plays a core role. This scoping review identifies documented linkages between social health protection and occupational health services in the global literature, highlighting both promising practices and coordination gaps between these two sub‐systems. Strengthening these linkages through intersectoral policy and practice can reinforce both systems, particularly in the face of global crises such as climate change. To our knowledge, this is the first mapping of the published literature on this issue.