Innovation in occupational health and safety (OHS) is often encouraged by government but government processes and policy can also discourage and limit this. An obvious example is where government insists on compliance with OHS laws in its tendering criteria but acknowledges that the tender safety criteria remains outdated and, privately, that OHS compliance is not …
The 2016 Workplace Wellness conference in Melbourne has heard about the Workhealth Improvement Network (WIN) through a panel of WIN participants. The point of difference of this panel is that the participants are from a range of different sized and regional companies. The significance of this difference should not be understated as conferences rarely include …
On 30 March 2016, Melbourne hosted a Workplace Wellness conference organised by Informa. (SafetyAtWorkBlog attended as a guest.) The reason for attending was to see how occupational health and safety (OHS) is growing, or needs to grow, to accommodate workplace wellness issues and how the wellness sector looks on OHS.
Earlier this month SafetyAtWorkBlog was critical of a (still yet to be released) guidebook on “Integrated approaches to worker health, safety and well-being”. Specifically the case study information in the guidebook needed more depth and it was suggested that “ This weakness could be compensated for through a strong campaign where the companies in the case …
Later this month, the Victorian WorkCover Authority (VWA) will be releasing a document entitled “Integrated approaches to worker health, safety and well-being” (pictured right, but not yet available online). It is intended to generate discussion on how to improve workplace safety performance by breaking down the walls of various disciplines, production processes, consultative silos and …
The 2014 Annual Report of the Victorian WorkCover Authority (VWA) states a new initiative on workplace mental health: “…a new direction for the VWA’s WorkHealth program has led to the Victorian Mental Wellbeing Collaboration. The VWA has invested in a tripartite collaboration with peak health promotion agencies VicHealth and SuperFriend to develop a range of …
Last week the Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) released a review of the WorkHealth program. The results are very positive and deserve detailed analysis. However these analyses do not seem to address all the expectations of the Victorian Government when the program was launched several years ago. Premier John Brumby said at the … Continue reading “WorkHealth raises health awareness but only so far”