[From prevention to health promotion by job design]

The definition of health once again was extended from well-being to the competence necessary for a socially and economically active life. Thus prevention may not be limited on impairment and illness. Along with the interest in factors producing illness the interest in health entrancing factors should be intensified. Main issues of health entrancing job design are: (1) Essential approaches of prevention are to be reevaluated. Mainly the strain/stress approach should be replaced by the approach of coping actively with the demanding tasks. (2) The objectives of health entrancing job design are to be re-evaluated too. The task demands (job content) are of equal importance as the work conditions. Job design should be centred around the desired health entrancing task characteristics. (3) The corrective type of job design should be displaced by a prospective design of health entrancing tasks from the outset. A theoretically based limited set of task characteristics, defined in technological terms, proved to be valid for the design of tasks with desired efficient and health-entrancing characteristics.