In January 2009, SafetyAtWorkBlog reported on the end of a political saga involving parliamentarian Paula Wriedt. Ms Wriedt has since become a spokesperson for the treatment of depression and on 10 August she spoke with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about more resources for the treatment of mental health issues in the young.
Category: rehabilitation
Australia’s “Find a Psychologist” directory
Several OHS regulators in Australia, OHS professional associations and trade union have directories for OHS advisers. Most of them are in the traditional OHS areas of guarding, engineering, chemical safety….. Psychosocial issues such as work stress or workplace bullying haven’t featured as much.
The Australian Psychological Society (APS) has a very good searchable directory for its members. The search results provide a brief table of those psychologists for the subject area in your region with a good amount of information on individual listings on the click-through.
A great feature is to locate someone within a radius of one’s town or suburb. The Society has thought about the geography if Australia by including a 200 kilometre radius option.
On a brief search for psychologists who specialise in work stress or workplace bullying, the large Australian capital cities had plenty of listings. Darwin came up empty as did Cairns, Alice Springs and Broom but these are remote locations and there may be psychologists in those areas who could provide assistance on workplace psychosocial issues, just not as specialists.
The “Find a Psychologist” directory is very easy to use and could be used by other member organisations as a template for their own databases. The APS website should be flagged by Australian OHS professionals who need he services of psychologists for workplace psychosocial assistance.
Alternative therapies
Many alternative therapies have proved to have a positive therapeutic or medical benefit and there is no reason why these should not be applied to work-related conditions.
In 2001, Jill Kaufman was interviewed for Safety At Work magazine. The interview is now available at SafetyAtWorkblog.
In 2001, the wellness industry in Australia was just starting and corporate health programs were searching for validity and credibility. Rehabilitation, just like health insurers, was beginning to allow for a broader range of medical treatments. It seemed useful to educate the OHS readers of the magazine with this developing approach to worker care.
Jill’s comments should be seen in their historical context but this does not make them any less interesting , or relevant. Below are a couple of excerpts:
“Placing a long term RTW employee through the Western medical process could, in fact, be continuing to injure them in terms of their self-esteem. A different approach on a holistic basis allows for an understanding of the injury through an understanding of the person.”
“SAW: Many rehabilitation programs measure success by the rapid return of a worker to work duties but also by the financial expenditure on that person’s rehabilitation. Can the value of the approach you advocate be similarly measured?
JK: There can be surprisingly simple solutions to what can appear to be very complicated issues. I think one of the surprising things that companies learn is that it is often not a big financial expenditure or a large amount of time that can provide positive results. If you tackle the problem with the wrong instruments and the wrong tools, it can seem a very long haul to turn around and use a non-Western approach. But in fact shifts in thinking can bring about quick results.”
“SAW: Many call centres are providing yoga, physiotherapy and massages to workers on the premises and often without the workers leaving their workstations. What are your thoughts on this practice?
JK: Often this is doing the absolute minimum that is required. To have people doing yoga at their desk, when a core element of yoga is centring your self, breathing exercises, the call centre is as different to the practices of yoga as you can get.”
The economic costs of a heart attack
A new Australian report estimates the total costs of heart attack and chest pain (Acute Coronary Syndrome or ACS) to the Australian economy – “total economic cost of $17.9 billion.” This Access Economics report, released in June 2009, has broad application for public policy but has some relevant information for safety and health management in the workplace.
If we take “productivity” as applying to work, as is reasonable, the report states that for 2009
“Indirect [health care system] costs [from ACS] are expected to account for $A3.8 billion, primarily due to lost productivity.”
This is a useful statistic for those workplace health advocates. In fact, the report specifically identified the workplace as
“…an excellent environment to facilitate the ongoing rehabilitation and lifestyle changes to prevent the re-occurrence of ACS event”.
One gap it identified in the treatment and monitoring of ACS was something that many have been advocating for some years, particularly with the aging population and increasing obesity rates:
“a standardised national program to support employees and employers and the extension of rehabilitation practices.”
Much of the report advocates important rehabilitation resources and services for when the patient is discharged from hospital. The report includes the following graphic but also recommends the basic elements of post-hospital care after an ACS event.
“For rehabilitation to be effective, comprehensive patient follow-up interviews after discharge are essential. At these follow-up interviews, the patient should undergo both physical assessments (e.g. blood pressure, cholesterol tests, ECGs) and emotional and psychological assessments (e.g. signs of depression, anxiety, stress, financial hardships). The psychological impact following an ACS event is an important, but often neglected, area in the management of ACS. Thus, if patients can better understand their conditions, it can empower them to cope with their anxieties caused by ACS.”
In specific reference to workplaces, the report says:
“Returning to work can require an adjustment in duties and the conditions under which the employee works.”
It is up to OHS and return-to-work professionals to determine exactly what strategies should be applied in these circumstances.
There were a couple of references in the report that may be worth following up:
Bhattacharyya MR, Perkins-Porras L, Whitehead DL, and A Steptoe (2007), Psychological and clinical predictors of return to work after acute coronary syndrome, European Heart Journal, Vol 28, Iss. 2, pp. 160-165.
Kovoor P, Lee AKY, Carrozzi F, Wiseman V, Byth K, Zecchin R, Dickson C, King M, Hall J, Ross DL, Uther JB, and AR Denniss (2006), Return to full normal activities including work at two weeks after acute myocardial infarction, American Journal of Cardiology, Vol 97, No. 7, pp. 952-958.
Harmonising workers compensation
Gabrielle Lis raised an issue in an article for Return To Work Matters that deserves to be seriously considered. The Australian Government is set on a path of harmonising OHS laws through the coordination role of Safe Work Australia. One of the key policies for Safe Work Australia is also to
“develop proposals relating to… harmonising workers’ compensation arrangements across the Commonwealth, States and Territories…”
Wow, this is more of a challenge than harmonising OHS laws. As Gabrielle writes
“Workers and employers don’t always see eye to eye on the issue, not to mention the differing interests of big businesses and small and medium enterprises, and the entrenched positions of the states and territories, who all tend to prefer “how we do things” to how things might best be done.”
Safe Work Australia is going to be dealing with over a dozen worker’s compensation insurers, around half a dozen workers’ compensation bureaucracies and thousands of stakeholders in the compensation, insurance, healthcare and return-to-work sectors.
This challenge is phenomenal and will not fit into any short-term schedule. This challenge differs from OHS in that it directly involves money, millions of it. The negotiations on OHS between government, unions and employer groups will be nothing compared to when the insurance companies move in on workers compensation.
(Disclaimer: Kevin Jones is a regular columnist for www.rtwmatters.org)
Welding explosion burn survivor talks about the experience
The 19 May 2009 edition of The 7.30 Report included a fresh perspective on rehabilitation from workplace injuries. According to the website
“Sydney man Frank Spiteri was not expected to live after suffering third-degree burns to 70 per cent of his body in a major workplace explosion in 2007.
Not only did Mr Spiteri survive, but he has transformed from an overweight businessman into a fitness fanatic who is determined to help other burns victims.”
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has provided an extended interview with Frank online. It is a story of extraordinary personal will, a story rarely seen on national television.
Cost of occupational injuries and illnesses rise
According to a report in the Australian Financial Review (page 5, not available online) on 14 April 2009, the costs of work-related injury and disease has increased to $A57.5 billion. This represents 5.9% of the country’s gross domestic product, up from 5% in 2000-01.
Of perhaps more concern is the sectors of society which are estiimated to bear these increasing costs. 49% of costs are borne by workers, 47% by the community and 3% by the employers. Even if the insurance costs were allocated to employers, this would only amount to 18% of the injury and diseases costs.
The figures from the report conducted by the Australian Safety & Compensation Council could justify the push by some in the OHS profession to move workplace safety into the area of public health. Regardless, the spread of the cost should be borne in mind when OHS organisations lobby government for more support and attention.