ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to discuss the role of occupational health services (OHS) in supporting the individual victims of bullying as well as in preventing, handling and resolving bullying situations in the workplace. Several studies have found that bullying is related to many kinds of stress symptoms and ill health (Einarsen et al., 1996; Kivimäki et al., 2000) among both victims and observers (Vartia, 2001), making the issue important from an OHS perspective. In the early 1990s, only 18 per cent of the targets of bullying in the municipal sector in Finland reported that they had sought help from occupational health professionals. At present, it is our opinion that the targets of bullying increasingly ask for help from OHS and that it is more common for a conflict situation in the workplace to be labelled ‘bullying’.
