[Guest post by Eric Windholz]
Last week I again had the pleasure to contribute to the Headfirst: A Concussion Podcast, this time talking about recent developments concerning the compensation of athletes (and in particular, AFL (Australian Football League) players) suffering concussion. The key takeaway – the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Continue reading “Australian Football Needs Better Workers Compensation”The concussion risks of sportspeople continue to appear in the media and popular discussions after every suicide, death, or retirement of sportspeople who play contact sports. Recently, Alan Pearce, Professor, Adjunct Research Fellow, School of Health Science, Swinburne University of Technology, wrote an opinion piece for The Australian newspaper (paywalled) that touched on some occupational health and safety (OHS) themes that deserve expanding.
[This article discusses suicide]
Adam Goodes will be a featured speaker at the 23rd World Congress of Health and Safety At Work in Sydney, Australia, in November 2023. My initial response was, “What does he know about workplace health and safety?” This question is perhaps more indicative of my limited perspective of occupational health and safety (OHS). I have discussed my question with several people over the last week and have a partial answer to my question, but, as is often the case in OHS, more questions arose.
David Michaels devoted a whole chapter to sport-related concussions and brain damage in his 2020 book “The Triumph of Doubt“. He wrote about how the National Football League obfuscated over the appearance of concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and how the the NFL downplayed the injury’s significance by referring to repeated head trauma as Mild Trauma Brain Injury.
The Australian experience is different and this was examined recently in an excellent edition of the ABC radio program, The Ticket. Significantly several interviewees mentioned the injuries in relation to occupational health and safety (OHS) and workers compensation.
When a former head of a national occupational health and safety (OHS) regulator writes a book, it may be a curiosity (and it is rare). But when the writer is the former Assistant Secretary of Labor for the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the book becomes interesting. When the book is called “The Triumph of Doubt – Dark Money and the Science of Deception“, it becomes a must-read. SafetyAtWorkBlog dips into David Michaels‘ new book (as I only received it yesterday) and finds treasure.
This is not the first time that Michaels has written about Doubt and how whole industries have developed to create, market and exploit Doubt for the benefit of the Establishment. However, the new book is super-topical in this time of “Fake News” and blatant disregard of science and scientists.
Zero Harm is hardly ever mentioned in Australia’s academic occupational health and safety (OHS) conferences, except maybe with a little snigger. But it was prominent at the NSCAV Foundation’s SafetyConnect conference in late August 2019. This was partly because this conference has more of a commercial bent compared to other conferences but also because several international speakers from Asia were able to clarify what was meant by the term.
This conference had an enviable number of prominent Asian OHS professionals and engineers. One of them Ho Siong Hin (pictured above) explained the application of Vision Zero by the Singaporean government and business community.
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.
