On Saturday I gave a seminar to AFOEM NSW. 42 people registered, 32 in the room and 10 online. My topic was Emerging best practice for case management by insurance schemes: Implications for occupational physicians (you can view the presentation here). The bulk of the…
Ross Gittins wasn’t losing any sleep over cuts to universities in this year’s budget. In a Sydney Morning Herald article titled ‘Our universities aren’t earning the money we’re giving them’ he laid out his criticisms. They can be summarised as: Having recently spent a decade…
WorkSafe NZ have issue a 10-year strategic plan for work-related health. Safeguard, a WHS safety magazine, asked me, along with others to comment. I thought the plan reflected the rather reluctant transition WHS is currently experiencing as it broadens from a health protection model: mandated…
Congratulations Howard Williams, one of the organisers of this year’s ALUCA conference, on a great conference. Held in Adelaide, numbers were up this year to 400. The opening address by futurist Gihan Perera was terrific. I spoke in one of the parallel sessions on 20…
The Safety Institute of Australia (SIA) in Tasmania held an event on Thursday 22 July at the slightly surreal hockey centre. The CEO of SIA, David Clarke, opened up outlining the action SIA is taking to enhance the professionalisation of the safety discipline. This includes defining…
This week I gave a webinar to the Workplace Health Association of Australia on the integration of OHS and workplace health promotion (WHP). I assumed that the members of this organisation were experts in WHP and would have heard of the ‘integrated approach’ or Total…
I attended the Northern Queensland conference on return to work (RTW) in Townsville on Friday 29 April. This was a terrific conference. Professor Alex Collie, ISCRR, gave an update on the evidence on engaging GPs in the RTW process. He showed that the proportion of…
By Niki Ellis Adjunct Professor, Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research and Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University www.nikiellis.com.au Follow @ProfNikiEllis Recently an organisation asked me to consider what being a mentally healthy workplace might look like for them. It was a…
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…
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…
