On April 19 2024, United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made a major speech about welfare reform and mental health. The UK has a strong tradition of public health support through its National Health Service, which always seems to be underfunded and under-resourced but holds huge cultural and medical significance in the community. Mental ill-health …
Burnout continues to have its moment in the sun. It is the cover story of the February 2024 edition of Psychology Today and is a major theme in a new book about exhaustion. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) declaration of burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” is downplayed or ignored in both publications....
Occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals, like anyone else, base their decisions and advice primarily on their living memory. This partly explains the trend of emphasising “lived experience” sometimes over history or research. But it is understandable that we trust experiences from people face-to-face over what we read or what Grandad sort-of remembers from his …
On December 29 2023, The Guardian newspaper’s cover story was about doctors in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service experiencing high rates of “moral distress”. It is common for hospitals and health care services to consider themselves as workplaces with unique hazards rather than suffering similar occupational health and safety (OHS) challenges to all other …
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is a remarkably insular profession. It tends to narrow its focus on legislative compliance even though Social Determinants of Health is a core unit of tertiary OHS education. OHS professionals are also notably weak in understanding the business realities that their employers and customers face. This inability to understand the …
Research findings that a sample of business and management courses have little to no OHS content are not surprising and match what has now become fashionable to call “lived experience”. Part of the reason for the findings is that the number of undergraduate courses in OHS has declined, and those that did exist were not …
Last year the International Labour Organization (ILO) added occupational health and safety (OHS) to its Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. So what? I hear you cry. According to one trade union website: “Contrary to Conventions – which are subject to ratification by individual Member States to be applicable, all Member States (187 … Continue reading “OHS is now a fundamental human right. So what?”
