An article last week touched briefly on the issue of the effect of synthetic drugs in the workplace in the context of drug and alcohol testing. The Australian newspaper on 28 September 2015 contained a front page article (paywalled) about mining company concerns over synthetic drugs at work, however it is an article that deserves greater analysis before anyone considers this as part of an evidence base as it is creatively constructed and relies on statements from a toxicologist working for drug testing laboratory. Continue reading “Front page drug testing article is marketing”
Category: health
OHS is in sports but by another name
After writing a recent article about the relevance of occupational health and safety (OHS) laws to sporting clubs, I attended a sports medicine seminar to access a different perspective on workplace safety.
Having never played sports outside the obligatory high school activities, which in my high school also included snooker?!, the world of locker rooms and team sports is foreign. But earlier this week I learnt that where OHS professionals talk about productivity, sportspeople speak of performance, and where factories address line speed, sports physicians talk of load management. I also learnt that professional sportspeople are exempt from workers’ compensation.
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FIFO mental health challenges the way we do business
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Yoga and yoghurt – corporate wellbeing
Professional organisations need to maintain personal contact between members and stakeholders even when social media allows for almost constant contact. Such events benefit from having thoughts challenged and recently one such event in Melbourne, Australia challenged its audience about psychological health and wellbeing.
A recent NSCA Foundation event heard from Andrew Douglas, one of the few workplace relations lawyers who can bridge the law and the real world. He began by describing wellness or wellbeing in a fresh context.
“Wellbeing is that equilibrium that is achieved between challenge and resources.”
This perspective addresses business operations and personnel management as challenges – situations that arise that need controlling or managing. This is a useful perspective as long as people feel up to the challenge and are not defeatist.
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More care needed in discussing workplace mental health and mental illness
Writing about workplace mental health is a tricky task. An article recently posted to Business News Western Australia shows how tricky it can be and how mental health can be misinterpreted as mental illness.
The headline, “Are you one of the 20% of workers that will experience a mental health issue?” clearly refers to workers but the first sentence of the article does not. “Australian adults” are not all “workers”.
Out of the total population of around 24 million Australians, Wikipedia estimates the working-age population of Australia (15 – 64 years) at round 67% (16 million, approximately). If we apply these statistics to the headline, there are 3.2 million workers who “will experience a mental health issue”. But is this annually, over one’s working life or over a lifetime? The article does not say.
Not only are the statistics messy, so is the terminology.
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Unfair expectations on the individual
Harvard Business Review (HBR) is a justifiably respected business publication but it often sells occupational health and safety (OHS) short. A new HBR article, “Stress Is Your Brain Trying to Avoid Something“, is a case in point.
Too much of the contemporary approaches to psychosocial hazards at work focus on the individual without addressing the organisational. This often compounds the struggles of individual workers and encourages managers to blame workers instead of analysing the organisational and cultural factors that lead to a hazard or incident.
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5 experts in 60 minutes
The Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) has tried a new format for its occupational health and safety (OHS) seminars. It is not a lunch with a single presenter and it is not a Three-Minute Thesis. It is five safety researchers in one hour, seven minutes per person and a single question from the floor – and it worked. Continue reading “5 experts in 60 minutes”