Part of the core duties of any occupational health and safety (OHS) regulator is the production of data. Recently Safe Work Australia (SWA) released its “Key Work Health and Safety Statistics” for 2015 and given the amount of media attention on workplace mental health, one would expect mental health to be one of the key …
Successful safety management relies on communication. Sometimes this is informal, as in prestart meetings or toolbox talks; sometimes it is formal, such as with Annual Reports and legacy documents. It is important for occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals to understand how to communicate in these two formats and to address different audiences and readerships. …
The decline of newspapers and other mainstream media is well-established (an excellent recent analysis of this has been undertaken by Ross Gittins), as is the increase in the influence of online or digital media. The information sources for occupational health and safety (OHS) have undergone a similar change, often due to the same technological and …
The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) commences its 2015 Congress this week. Each year around 800 trade union delegates meet to discuss changes to policies and to develop or refine strategies. This year the ACTU released its draft policies publicly prior to the Congress. These policies have a long and strong historical and industrial …
In 2012, SafetyAtWorkBlog reviewed the first edition of the Australian Master Work Health and Safety Guide. CCH Wolters Kluwer has released its second edition and, sadly, it repeats many of the criticisms in the 2012 review. The title of Australian Master Work Health and Safety Guide (2nd ed) seems inaccurate if one considers a book with …
Safe Work Australia recently released its second research paper related to developing or communicating a business case for occupational health and safety (OHS). The paper has been authored by Sharron O’Neill and is called “The Business Case for Safe, Healthy and Productive Work – Implications for resource allocation: Procurement, Contracting and infrastructure decisions“. O’Neill’s paper …
The Queensland Premier, Campbell Newman, called a “snap” election for the end of January 2015. On 11 January 2015, Newman tweeted: “Queenslanders injured at work are covered by Australia’s strongest workers’ compensation scheme.” This is a further example of political newspeak as what does a “strong” workers’ compensation scheme look like? Newman’s tweet included an … Continue reading “Queensland’s workers’ compensation performance is “double plus good””