Clinical medicine focuses on the individual and many clinicians are weak when it comes to devising solutions for populations. It is the tendency of the clinician to suggest the use of limited resources in understanding details of a single case, rather than to use resources to reduce risk in the workplace as a whole. Conflict also occurs when there is uncertainty about the relationship between a workplace exposure and worker disease. Researchers, as a group, are wary of any occupational health and safety program. Their questions about health and safety are often more specific than the general expertise of the occupational health and safety practitioners, and their knowledge of their discipline is unequaled.
Protocols often develop under time pressures from grant deadlines.
As a result, the researcher may view an occupational health and safety program as a useful institutional support service, but possibly as a necessary nuisance, or even as a hindrance to their work and a drain on limited resources. Veterinarians administer the animal care facility, and their knowledge of zoonoses exceeds that of many human health practitioners. In the absence of occupational health care practitioners, they may be called upon to provide health care services to employees. A vigorous occupational health and safety program may be seen as an incursion of their turf. Administrators prefer to direct institutional resources to high return, high profile programs.