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Health and safety
that this inner-city development’s location – close to
public transport, shops and community services –
encouraged residents to travel and join community
activities. Meanwhile the researchers’ videos of
residents’ movements were used to develop a plan
showing degrees of physical access. Colour-coded
mapping marked, for example, areas that could not
Testing how
workplaces
measure up
A Leading Indicators of Workplace Health and Safety
project has been set up in Victoria to identify factors that
might reduce the rate of injury and illness in workplaces.
A research team led by Professor Helen De Cieri
of Monash University’s Department of Management
has been adapting and validating a Canadian eightquestion measurement tool known as the Organisational
Performance Metric (OPM) – a questionnaire used to
assess an organisation’s occupational health and safety
performance before injuries or illnesses occur.
“Management commitment to health and safety is
critical,” Professor De Cieri says. “Does it encourage you
to work safely? Are you given the equipment you need? Do
you have the opportunity to say ‘stop work – it’s not safe’?”
Professor De Cieri’s five-person team tested the
OPM on 3600 managers, supervisors and employees
in 66 different workplaces run by six large Australian
companies and then asked the respondents about their
own experience of injury and illness at work.
OCTOBER 2015
Monash University
be reached, and illustrated the effect of furniture
layout on residents’ use of space. Deep couches
can look comfortable, but also take a lot of floor
space and may be an obstacle.
Mapping flagged an important question:
“Do you tailor an environment to a particular
individual, or do you make a spatial design more
generic and then pay a support worker to help?”
Similarly, the survey of residents’ use of iPad
functions such as curtain-opening highlighted the
question: “Do you fully install all these automated
functions, or just install the wiring and wait to see
if a particular resident will actually need all the
automatic functions?”
“It highlighted the need for a much more
nuanced understanding of what ‘home’ might
mean,” Dr Tregloan says. “For a person with a
disability, a great home should look good but
furnished spaces and supports should also be
refined for particular needs.”
The researchers also created panoramic virtual
apartment tours for potential residents and their families
to navigate on screen, with pulsing dots and circles
indicating hot spots where particular problems might
be, such as homelike but possibly impractical couches.
The researchers found several opportunities
for specialist accommodation designers to rethink
traditional approaches. Concepts of public and
private spaces can be different, as residents may no
longer use their bathrooms alone, and instead have
most time to themselves in the lounge area, more
usually planned as a public space. So an apartment
with the bathroom entrance close to the front door
might mean support staff do not have to pass
through other spaces to reach it.
After matching the results at each workplace with the
number of workplace incidents, the researchers found a
Mindset rethink
direct correlation between a high positive score on the
ISCRR also monitors world research trends.
Accordingly, a UK push to recognise the health
benefits of getting people back to work after an
injury was a key influence, along with a position
statement from the Royal Australasian College of
Physicians, on ISCRR’s FIT to Work project: a
$600,000 series of studies aimed at changing the
test and a lower rate of workplace incidents.
In another stage of the research, surveys were
conducted with more than 9500 union members: “It
shows the high level of research rigour behind a simple,
practical tool that can flag safety issues in a workplace.”
role of general practitioners (GPs) in encouraging
patients back to work.
“The default setting in Australia has been the
sick note, which emphasises what an injured worker
can’t do,” Professor Collie says. “The push in other
countries has been to change that to a ‘fit note’, with
the emphasis on what people can do.”
A four-member team led by Professor Danielle
Mazza, head of the Monash Department of General
Practice, examined 125,000 workers’ claims
involving 10,000 GPs and found that 70 per cent of
the doctors’ certificates found patients unfit for work.
“If there was a mental health issue, 94 per cent of
people were recommended unfit for work,” says team
member and senior research fellow Dr Bianca Brijnath.
“We know there is a strong link between having no
work and having poor health. To keep certifying people
as unfit for work may not be best for the patient.”
The team discovered that the design of the
typical medical form, especially when filled out
quickly, was implicated in the high number of
certificates indicating people were unfit for work.
In Victoria the certificate has been redesigned to
focus questions on tasks a patient might be fit for, as
opposed to what they cannot do.
A $500,000 project to develop, implement
and assess an online training package for
physiotherapists is a companion piece to FIT to
Work because many people see a physiotherapist to
renew their initial GP-issued unfit for work certificate.
A team led by Monash Department of
Physiotherapy’s Professor Jenny Keating created a
two-hour interactive online program in which users
are “virtual” observers of four client–physiotherapist
sessions. Users assume the physiotherapist’s role,
intermittently answering questions to measure their
reasoning in recommending, or otherwise, a person’s
return to work in some capacity.
Professor Keating says this education of health
professionals reminds them of the importance of
returning people to work in some capacity as soon
as possi