Guest Editorial: Special Issue – Understanding small enterprises: Healthy lives in healthy businesses

AbstractAlthough much is known about small and medium enterprises (SMEs), our current knowledge and understanding of occupational health and safety (OHS) and the work environment in SMEs is limited. Far less is known about how SMEs put our knowledge of OSH into action. In short, how do we create healthy work and healthy lives as well as ‘healthy business’ in SMEs? The present paper, which also acts as an Editorial for this special issue, addresses these questions by providing a summary of current knowledge – our understanding – about how to create healthy work and healthy lives for workers and owner-managers in SMEs whilst concurrently also aiming to create a healthy business (in terms of profitability and sustainability). This paper and the special issue also emphasise the need to convert this knowledge into action – ‘from understanding to action’.