A study of health care for seafarer onboard offshore supply vessels

Abstract

In Malaysia, there are many shipping companies that provide marine offshore support services to the oil platforms for major oil companies especially in the Eastern Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Offshore Support Vessels (OSVs) or Platform Supply Vessels (PSVs) are ships that are specially designed to supply services and materials to offshore oil platforms. In the offshore industry, seafarers are the backbone of the industry which without them the operation will not stroll. Therefore, shipping companies need to do all they can to promote seafarers health care and safe working as best practice procedures as possible. Although in Malaysia, seafarers who want to work onboard any vessel must comply with the international and local law which state that they must proceeds with a medical check up and issue with certificate to approve they past the examination and fit to work at sea, but there are some weakness in the system where the certificate has long expired time where it is can be used continuously until expired. Therefore, the seafarers were not being proven to be fully fit and healthy to work onboard the ship. In the other hand, as we all known that seafaring is a dangerous occupation because of the nature of the work such as bad weather, rough sea and old ship that contribute to ship collision, capsizing and sinking where every year numerous fatalities of seafarers have been recorded. During their time working onboard the ship, seafarers are also exposed to various noxious agents such as noise and vibration, exhaust gases, toxic or dangerous cargo and other air pollution. Since the ships are their home and workplace, the exposure to sea and air environments and noxious agents can be continuous for months as long as the crews are onboard the vessels. Therefore this research study to aim to evaluate the effectiveness of seafarer health care that have been done onboard the OSVs either by the seafarers themselves or the officers in charge onboard the vessel nor the company that employ them and to identify the common health problems among OSVs crews. Thus, from the result some recommendation can be made to improve and enhance the health care onboard OSVs.