Just over a week ago, RMIT University’s research funding program, SHINe, conducted its inaugural symposium. This symposium was both new and fascinating. It was overbooked with a considerable weight list, I think, because of the international safety research guests, but the fact that an event in Safe Work Month was free might have helped. The research by the Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA) for the United States was a highlight.
Dean Yates is a prominent Australian speaker on the issue of moral injury. Yesterday, at a WorkSafe Tasmania seminar, Yates brought the 250 attendees up to date on the status of moral injury and its occupational context. Although this seminar was a Safe Work Month event, Yates’ information requires some thought to fit with the occupational health and safety (OHS) and psychological hazards contexts.
Further to last week’s article about occupational health and safety (OHS) in horse racing, Minister Pettersson provided clarification to the ACT Parliament, sort of.
Australian occupational health and safety (OHS) laws require employers to be compliant with their OHS duties, but also allow the flexibility for employers to determine their own level of compliance. This has complicated OHS because employers can never be sure that they are in compliance. Compliance and non-compliance are usually determined accurately through the courts after legal action by the OHS regulatory agency and after a workplace incident. This uncertainty is compounded for small business owners who just want to be told what to do to be compliant.
Perhaps the most challenged industry sector is farming, which cannot avoid the uncertainty that the OHS laws provide. This uncertainty is one that highly-resourced employers are proud to claim as a well-fought-for benefit, namely, flexibility, but it is more of a problem for isolated rural workplaces and small businesses.
We know what employers/leaders do or do not do about psychosocial hazards at work and the psychological impacts. But there is still insufficient discussion on why those leaders make those choices. Recently, Dr Caroline Howe came close to answering the “why” in a blog article for her Psychosocial Safety and Leadership Institute.
The Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS) state branches conduct local single-day symposia annually. These networking and professional development sessions are important opportunities for practitioners of occupational health and safety (OHS) to connect and learn.
The good presenters were very good at the Victorian Branch symposium in September.
Earlier this week, I was a panellist at an occupational health and safety symposium organised by the Victorian Branch of the Australian Institute of Health and Safety. We were asked to be challenging and provocative in our perspectives on the evolution of OHS and OHS law in Victoria since the start of the century.
