Occupational health and safety (OHS) has always dealt with death. Many of the most significant legislative and operational changes have resulted from one or more work-related deaths. The horror and tragedy of each death cause us to redouble our efforts to prevent untimely death. The reality of occupational deaths and the quest to prevent death …
Another article reporting on Dr William Fleming’s workplace wellness research appeared recently in the New York Times, reproduced in some Australian newspapers like The Age (not available online). Newspapers are entitled to edit other newspaper’s articles for many reasons. Most tweaks are legitimate, but, in this case, The Age dropped an entire paragraph, which does …
First, there was brainwashing, then greenwashing and safewashing. Could the well-being industry be accused of safewashing? Has well-being had its day in the sun? The first use of safewash to describe presenting occupational health and safety (OHS) information in a diffused truth was in the 2016 research paper by Sharron O’Neill, Jack Flanagan and Kevin …
In early January 2024, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a commentary by Professor Alex Collie that illustrates the need to broaden our consideration of “traditional” and psychosocial hazards and well-being at work. The article is paywalled but worth obtaining a copy. Collie‘s research is always interesting, and being published in the BMJ adds some …
Dr William Fleming’s open-access article called Employee well‐being outcomes from individual‐level “Mental Health Interventions: Cross‐sectional Evidence from the United Kingdom” is receiving a lot of online and mainstream media attention, and rightly so. It is a robust piece of research from a sample of over 46,000 workers in 233 organisations. The article compares: “…participants and …
Occupational health and safety (OHS) has never had a profile as high as that of the environmental protection movement. OHS has never had a single, focused advocate like Greenpeace to make it visible. OHS activists do not hang banners off Tower Bridge or throw eggs at politicians (yet). One of the characteristics shared by OHS … Continue reading “Can we laugh at workplace health and safety?”
Every occupational health and safety (OHS) conference over the last twenty years seems to have revolved around the twin concepts of culture and leadership. The fascination with these concepts deserves analysis as they are confusing, and sometimes conflicting, and this is unhelpful for those in the lower or middle order of the management structures who …
