Posted on March 19, 2015 in WHS
We are starting to see evidence of a more collaborative approach in WHS. Recently WorkSafe Victoria has begun a new program, for example (I am a paid advisor), in which it has formed partnerships with organisations in the manufacturing and health industries..
The organisations have been chosen for their established networks and track record in driving change in these industries. The partnership aims to see businesses within these networks use quality improvement methodologies to develop adaptive approaches to improve musculo-skeletal health, mental health, and safety culture. The methodologies integrate interventions from OHS, workplace health promotion and human resources, and ideally link with other community initiatives.
So here’s a crossword clue for The Age – More complex, more complicated, more effective solutions for WHS, 4 letters: KICS.
First published in Thomson Reuters Inside OHS, the supplement to Occupational Health News, February 2015
Posted on March 19, 2015 in WHS
In public health, the point of thinking about systems, of mapping systems (agonising though it looks!), is to find “new ways of framing public health (that) may increase our understanding, expand our options and increase our effectiveness”, said Kenneth McLeroy in the American Journal of Public Health, March 2006.
When I took up my former role as Foundation CEO of the Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research in 2010, I initiated a project using futures methodologies.
A probable future for WHS that emerged from that work was that we would work less in isolation from others, not so much in the hero organisations. We would have to become more collaborative to prosper.
Somebody gave me a good example of this recently. We took a reductionist view of bullying, and created a WHS rod for our backs – a systems view would have seen us mapping a complex picture of causes and potential partners for more complicated and effective solutions.
Posted on March 19, 2015 in Uncategorized
These ideas have far reaching implications for WHS. For a start we need to recognise that the health issues with which we are dealing are complex. For too long we have accepted a reductionist approach – focusing on the easier to identify workplace risk factors and neglecting workplace psychosocial risks arising from precarious work, bad job design and toxic managers.
Our KISS approach (keep it simple stupid) stood us in good stead for decades. It has its advantages but we have well and truly come unstuck on mental health.
I recall the Productivity Commissioner who led the benchmarking review on OHS regulation in the early 2000s saying he was astonished how unprepared Australian OHS authorities were for mental health.
We have been slow to grapple with the complexity of the inter-relationship between physical and psychosocial causes and physical and mental health outcomes; and the obvious fact that health at work is affected by a combination of personal and environmental determinants from home and the community as well as in workplaces.
We know but largely ignore that the broader economy is a major driver of claims performance, and that when people run out of workers’ compensation they fall back on the social security system. We have shockingly failed to adequately address the significant contribution work makes to cardiovascular disorders, cancers and other diseases.
Posted on March 19, 2015 in Uncategorized
Diane Finegood, the President of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in Canada addressed CEIPS event (below).The session was described in a CEIPS blog which said Finegood explained how a systems approach differed from business as usual in public health as it would support adaptive change rather than imposing standardised interventions through models, guidelines and frameworks.
The blogger wrote, quoting an interviewee in his or her own research, “The day of scalability, of standardised programs, is dead”: Recognition that one size does not fit all.
Reporting on the discussion following Finegood’s presentation, the blogger described some resistance to the idea of throwing out governments’ “command and control” role completely, pointing to its effectiveness in tobacco control.
Posted on March 19, 2015 in Uncategorized
In October last year CEIPS sponsored an event in Melbourne covering the topic the topic “Solving Complex Problems: Adaptation vs Attribution”.
Posted on March 19, 2015 in Uncategorized
In the course of this work the question emerged: “What is the difference between complex and complicated?”. The first time I read this it did my head in, even more so than my new daily ritual of The Age crossword.
The answer is (I think), complexity is a property of the system and complicated is a reference to an intervention applied to that system. According to Allan Shiell, CEO of the Centre for Excellence in Intervention and Prevention Science (CEIPS) in Victoria, speaking at a conference in 2013, “Communities, work-sites, schools etc … are complex adaptive systems … more ‘biological’ than ‘mechanical'”. Complex adaptive systems require complicated interventions.
“A complex (complicated) intervention is ‘built up from a number of components, which may act both independently and inter-independently.’ This makes it hard to define the active ingredient.” Shiell again, writing with others in 2008.
Systems thinking focuses on the whole and relationships and connections within. Interventions based on systems thinking work with or around relevant properties of systems, and have an emphasis on implementation, quality improvement and adaptation to context, according to Shiell.
Posted on March 19, 2015 in WHS
The era of top down communication is dead and, it was observed in discussion, governments have not yet come to terms with this fairly dramatic change with huge implications for policy development.
For us in workplace health and safety (WHS) it means the days of thinking that developing and issuing a guidance note is an effective way to spend our time and money are well and truly over.
Meanwhile our colleagues in public health have been grappling with “systems thinking”. This has been in response to the development of knowledge on the social determinants of health – the recognition that health outcomes, such as obesity, are complex.. This is due to a myriad of interacting health risks (and opportunities) arising from personal and social and physical environmental factors.
Posted on March 19, 2015 in WHS
Adjunct Professor, Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research and Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University
First published in Thomson Reuters Inside OHS, the supplement to Occupational Health News, February 2015
Recently a board of which I am a member had a planning day. We had an excellent presentation by David Chalke from AustraliaSCAN about the future, including the loss of faith in institutions, something that is happening now, and that we can expect to see more of.
Instead of taking advice from governments, business leaders, unions and others, Australians determine their attitudes and beliefs from sources they have chosen to follow, reinforced by ‘friends’ around them.
In consideration of the number of ‘friends’, Chalke made reference to Dunbar’s number. 1990s anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that there was a correlation between average brain size and the average social group size in primates.
According to this theory, extrapolating from research in primates and relating it to human brain size it turns out that the number of stable relationships we are capable of sustaining is between 100 and 250, and 150 is usually adopted – Dunbar’s number.. Groups greater than 250 “require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group“.