This study summarises the findings of a survey of trade union health and safety training provisions carried out by the TUTB with the assistance of the two authors. The response to this survey showed that training in health at work issues was a priority concern of many trade union organisations. The application of the Framework Directive in particular will expand the responsibilities of workers' health and safety representatives in most Community countries, and in some of them - like Italy and Spain - will lead to the election or designation of a large number of new representatives. In Italy alone, close to 150,000 prevention representatives are expected to be elected.

The TUTB survey endeavours to describe the practices used to train these representatives by reference to selected basic criteria: who does the training, on what topics? how much of the target group does it reach? how is it evaluated? and so on. This necessarily brief and incomplete description is supplemented and illustrated by case studies of ground-breaking schemes. While these vary widely, some common threads can be picked out, such as the gradual shift from the transfer of knowledge about standards (whether legal rules or medical/technical criteria) towards the joint development of an action-oriented knowledge - a development which entails a radical questioning of the teaching/learning methods used.