Health and Safety in Romania: 6 Things to Know, and Why Your Other CEE Documents Will Not Transfer
A great many international firms now run more than one delivery centre in central and eastern Europe. Poland and Romania, or Romania and the Czech Republic, or all three, often established within a few years of each other by the same expansion team.
The natural assumption is that these countries are broadly interchangeable for compliance purposes. They joined the same union, implemented the same directive, and their requirements look similar in outline: a risk assessment, a designated person, training before starting work, occupational medical examinations, a committee above a certain headcount.
The outline is similar. The artefacts are not, and Romania makes the point more sharply than most, because its rules specify not only what must be recorded but the physical form the record takes.
Six things to know.
1. The individual training record is a prescribed document
Start here, because it is the requirement that most reliably defeats a group process.
Romanian law requires the result of health and safety training to be recorded in an individual training record, the fișa de instruire individuală, following a model set out in the implementing norms. It must show the material covered, the duration and the date.
Then the detail that surprises people. The record is to be completed in ballpoint or fountain pen, immediately after the training has been verified, and signed by the worker together with the people who delivered and verified it. It is held by the head of the workplace, accompanied by a copy of the worker's most recent fitness certificate from the occupational physician, and retained from hiring until the employment ends.
A group that runs onboarding through a learning management system and produces a digital completion record has not produced this document. That is not a technicality an inspector will overlook, because the form is prescribed rather than incidental. Confirm the current position through local advice, since the norms have been amended more than once, but plan on the basis that a screenshot of a completed module will not do.
2. Training comes in three phases, with minimum durations
The structure is prescribed as well as the record.
Training runs in three phases: an introductory general phase, a phase at the actual workplace, and periodic training thereafter. The introductory general training is delivered individually or in groups of no more than twenty, and the employer sets its duration through its own instructions subject to a minimum, which for the introductory phase is a full working day's worth rather than an hour.
Two consequences for a scaling delivery centre. Onboarding a cohort of thirty means running more than one session. And a worker may only begin at their post after their knowledge has been verified by someone senior to the person who trained them, with that verification recorded.
3. The employer must write its own instructions
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Romanian employers are expected to produce their own workplace-specific health and safety instructions, alongside the risk assessment and a prevention and protection plan.
This is where a translated group policy fails most visibly. The instructions are meant to reflect the actual work at that site, and they are the reference point for what the training covers. A document describing a global standard, rendered into Romanian, does not describe the work in Cluj.
The Labour Inspection body, Inspecția Muncii, is the enforcement authority, and the implementing norms under the occupational safety law are published in consolidated form by legal publishers such as Rubinian.
4. Someone must be formally designated
As across the region, prevention activity must be assigned rather than assumed.
The employer may perform the activity personally in limited circumstances, designate one or more workers, establish an internal prevention and protection service, or engage an external service. The option available depends on the size and nature of the undertaking, and the designated person requires specified training.
The pattern in foreign-owned entities is familiar by now: the role is attached informally to an office manager or a local HR lead, with no designation on record and no qualification behind it. That is a structural gap rather than a paperwork one.
5. Occupational medicine is a separate, linked obligation
Medical examinations at employment and periodically thereafter are handled through occupational medicine services, and the resulting fitness certificate is linked directly to the training record, since a copy accompanies it.
That linkage is the useful thing to understand. The two obligations are not independent workstreams that happen to concern the same employee. The documents reference each other, which means a gap in one shows up as an incompleteness in the other.
6. The committee threshold, and what changes
A joint health and safety committee is required above a defined headcount, with employer and employee representation, meeting on a regular cycle.
Confirm the applicable threshold and composition for your entity rather than assuming it matches the neighbouring country, because these numbers differ across the region even where the concept is shared. A delivery centre that has grown quickly is the most likely to have crossed it without anyone noticing.
Why the documents do not transfer
The comparison is the point of this article, so it is worth setting out plainly.
| Requirement | Poland | Czech Republic | Romania | |---|---|---|---| | Before starting work | Medical certificate and initial training required before admission | Entry medical examination | Training verified and recorded before the worker begins at the post | | Training record | National format and retention rules | Documented, workplace-specific | Prescribed form, handwritten, dual signature, retained for the employment | | Classification duty | None equivalent | Every job categorised and notified to the public health authority | None equivalent | | Prevention role | Assigned or external specialist, qualification prescribed | Qualified person, requirements scale with size | Designated worker, internal or external service, training prescribed | | Committee | Above a defined headcount | Above a defined headcount | Above a defined headcount, figures differ |
Read across the rows. Every column contains a real obligation, none of the columns matches another, and a document produced for one will not satisfy the next. The Czech categorisation duty has no Polish or Romanian counterpart. The Romanian handwritten training record has no Czech or Polish equivalent in that form.
This descends from the same EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC, which sets the outcome and leaves each member state to build the machinery. The machinery is what you have to comply with.
What this means for a multi-country delivery footprint
Three practical conclusions.
Do not template across the region. The instinct to produce one central and eastern European pack is strong and it produces documents that are wrong in every country rather than right in one.
Localise the artefact, standardise the system. What travels is the methodology, the register, the review cycle and the reporting. What does not travel is the document that satisfies the national requirement, which has to be produced locally in the prescribed form.
Check the smallest entity first. Delivery centres scale fast and governance lags, so the site that opened most recently is usually the one furthest behind.
Holding one group view while each entity satisfies its own national test is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits confirm each local artefact is in the form its own law requires rather than merely present.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with locally qualified practitioners in Romania and across the region, so each entity's documents are produced in the form its own inspectorate expects, while your group keeps one point of contact and one view of compliance. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with IT and software and finance and banking organisations, which account for most foreign-owned headcount in Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara and Iași.
Our global health and safety consultants handle the neighbouring jurisdictions that usually accompany a Romanian entity, and our international health and safety consultants can establish what is outstanding locally. If your Romanian office was onboarded through a group system, a free gap analysis will tell you which records would not survive an inspection.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
