COVID19 – Page 10 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Business nuggets from the Australian Financial Review

It is not possible to write as many occupational health and safety (OHS) articles as I would like to, and my newspaper clippings files are bulging by the time I get some time to tidy up. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) is an expensive business newspaper that often touches on OHS matters even though OHS may not be the core of the story. Below is a short discussion of many of those clippings from 2020. Most of the AFR articles are paywalled but can often be tracked down through other measures.

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Right information, wrong magazine

The OHS Professional magazine for December 2020 contains a very good article about workplace psychological risks and the occupational health and safety (OHS) strategy to prevent mental harm. The only negative is that it is not published in a Human Resources magazine, or one for company directors. The preventative techniques are well known to the OHS profession and based on independent scientific evidence, but it is other managerial disciplines that need to learn the difference between preventing psychological harm and providing symptomatic relief.

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All being well!

This time last year Australia was facing horrendous bushfires and days of thick smoke. Yesterday we, in Melbourne, received over an inch of rainfall. For many Christmas was far less than joyous. At the same time a global incurable coronavirus was spreading.

Occupational health and safety (OHS) took a back seat in many ways but also came to the fore in others, depending on how exposed employers felt their businesses were and whether OHS professionals were sufficiently adaptable; depending on whether one saw public health that affects work as a workplace hazard, or let the public health people get on with their work. In all these circumstances there was a little bit of panic and varying levels of fear and anguish.

Alan Jones vs Dan Andrews

The calls continue for the Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews, to be charged with Industrial Manslaughter over COVID19-related deaths that resulted from a poorly-managed hotel quarantine program. This time the topic was picked up be one of Australia’s conservative big guns, Alan Jones.

Jones hyperbolic rhetoric was on full display in his interview with Ken Phillips, who started the Andrews Industrial Manslaughter campaign.

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Fire Flood Plague OHS

2020 is a year of continuing social change, so a book of essays that reflects on 2020 seems a little presumptuous. But just because we are in a state of social flux does not mean we must wait for stability before examining the process of change.

This December Random House Penguin will publish “Fire Flood Plague“, a collection of essays from prominent Australian writers about what Tim Flannery calls the three catastrophes:

“…the unprecedented, climate-fuelled megafires that were extinguished by damaging, climate-influenced floods. Then, in March, the COVID-19 pandemic…..”
page 69-70

There are some parallels between how people responded to these disasters and how workplace safety and health is managed. But more than that, the essays provide an insight into how others feel about what is happening, and these writers’ thoughts will reflect the thoughts of those with whom we work, with those we are obliged to manage and with those whose physical and mental welfare we are obliged to improve.

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Evidence of COVID19 anxiety AND optimism

One of the first research reports into the psychological impacts of the COVID19 pandemic has been published in the Medical Journal of Australia. It studied the first month of the infection’s appearance in Australia and seems much more evidential than some of the marketing-based survey reports that have also appeared in the last three months. Below is a reformatted summary of findings from the report’s Abstract:

“The estimated prevalence of clinically significant symptoms of depression was 27.6% and
of clinically significant symptoms of anxiety 21.0%
14.6% of respondents reported thoughts of being better off dead or self-harm on at least some days and
59.2% that they were more irritable.
An estimated 28.3% of respondents reported great optimism about the future.”

The structure of this study was limited to a specific timeframe – April 3-May 3 2020 – so it is no surprise that most of the respondents who had contracted COVID19 were from New South Wales which had outbreaks from the Ruby Princess cruise ship and several aged care facilities prior to the survey period.

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Clues to the “new normal” of work

The COVID19 pandemic has devastated many countries but it has also created business opportunities. Recently workplace IT company Skedulo released a whitepaper about the new work normal. The document is essentially a marketing strategy but there are some hints about workplace change that may be of interest to occupational health and safety (OHS) advocates and professionals.

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Category: COVID19

Business nuggets from the Australian Financial Review

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Right information, wrong magazine

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All being well!

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Alan Jones vs Dan Andrews

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Fire Flood Plague OHS

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Evidence of COVID19 anxiety AND optimism

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Clues to the “new normal” of work

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