In support of World Mental Health Day, SafetyAtWorkBlog has opened access to several mental health and suicide prevention articles for a limited time.
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Category: Duty of Care
Shared Values, Social Values and Safety Values
Last week, the Shared Value Project launched its whitepaper called “Creating Shared Value, the Business Imperative to Improve Mental Health in Australia.” It is an interesting document that is part of the trend of reconfiguring capitalism, the decline of neoliberalism, talk of a “social licence”, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and more. Depending on one’s position on capitalism, this makes it part of the wave of change or another failed humanitarian action in the wake of that capitalism.
Several people spoke at the launch, including Professor Allan Fels and the Victorian Minister for Mental Health, Martin Foley.
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Australian silicosis research mirrored in the US
At the end of October 2019 the Australia New Zealand Society of Occupational Medicine (ANZSOM) will be conducting its annual scientific meeting in Adelaide. There are many issues on the agenda but silicosis is likely to figure prominently as it did last year, and as it should. The politics, knowledge and regulatory action has changed in the intervening twelve months.
Australia has new guidances from several occupational health and safety (OHS) regulators and agencies which restrict or ban dry-cutting of engineered stone and change other safety-related practices. There is also at least one political move to ban the use of engineered stone. But perhaps more important is that new research on silicosis risks is appearing and not just from Australia. The United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new research on 27 September 2019 based on medical assessments and several silicosis-related deaths.
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Bystanders, safety hazards and prevention of harm – “what you do or don’t do”
Occupational health and safety (OHS) relies on workers to “blow the whistle” on the existence of hazards to their employers, even though the process is not considered whistleblowing. The avoidance of many workplace hazards has always relied on bystanders – one’s work colleagues who may say “watch out!” In recent years, the action of notifying employers and authorities of hazards, and of drawing colleagues’ attention to0 hazards has increased in prominence and debate, especially around the issue of psychological harm and, a subset of that harm – sexual harassment.
In September 2019, the Victorian Government released what it describes as a toolkit on bystander interventions in relation to sexual harassment and sexism. The full document is useful but, as with many government guidances on this issue, almost ignores the role of health and safety management in the prevention and reduction of this type of hazard.
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COSBOA is outraged over mental health and jail
On September 24 2019, the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA) called for the withdrawal of the Boland review into Australia’s work health and safety (WHS) laws.
In a media release COSBOA’s CEO, Peter Strong, states:
Continue reading “COSBOA is outraged over mental health and jail”“The report solely focusses on workers, giving zero consideration to the mental health of employers and the self-employed….”
Important discussion of moral harm, moral repair and what can be done
Occupational health and safety (OHS) needs to talk more about failure, in a similar way that other business processes are dissected and reported. But the challenge to this, and I think the main reasons failure is not discussed, is that OHS failures result in serious injuries, life-altering conditions and deaths. OHS shares something with the medical profession which “buries its mistakes”. There appears to be something shameful in talking about these failures in public, although the OHS profession is full of chatty anecdotes in private.
One of the ways for OHS to discuss these uncomfortable experiences is to focus on Harm rather than legalities and the chase for compliance.
The first paragraph in Derek Brookes‘ new book, “Beyond Harm“, seems to speak to the OHS profession:
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Aim for prevention, to affect real change
The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) has released its submission (not yet online) to the Safe Work Australia’s (SWA) review of the Regulatory Impact Statement on the recommendations from the Boland review of the Model Work Health and Safety laws. It is comprehensive but contains little that is new. An interesting interpretation of the submission comes from considering how the MCA’s recommendations prevent harm, for prevention is the challenge.
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