11/10/2022

South Australia’s peak trade union council is looking to ramp up its training courses around psychological hazards in the workplace.

SA Unions, which represents 160,000 workers across the state, has also recently appointed a full-time trainer to help it boost course offerings as it heads back into face-to-face learning after the COVID-19 pandemic.

SA Unions’ Manager of Health and Safety Training Dash Taylor Johnson played an integral role in last month’s ACTU Centre for Health and Safety Mental Health Workplace Safety Conference in Melbourne along with union organisers, OHS and industrial officials and educators.

The conference focused on treating psychosocial hazards in the same way as physical hazards – identification, risk assessment, risk controls, review effectiveness.

SA Unions Secretary Dale Beasley said unions had been ‘ringing the alarm bell’ about the hazards of mental health for years.

‘It’s important our training reflects that,’ he said.

October is National Safe Work Month with the second week focusing on mental health.

The 2021 Work Shouldn’t Hurt survey of 25,000 workers across Australia found that three out of 10 workers sustained some kind of physical or mental injury in the previous 12 months.

The Australian Unions survey also found that a third of all workers were regularly exposed to stress at work.

Industries with the highest rates of mental health injuries were the healthcare industry (28 per cent) and the retail industry (27 per cent).

However, the survey found a positive correlation between health and safety representatives (HSRs) being present and better-reported health and safety risks in the workplace.

Almost 80 per cent of workers with an HSR present said their workplace complies with work health and safety policies, as opposed to 51 per cent of workers with no HSR present.

SA Unions is the state branch of the ACTU and is a certified training provider, delivering training to hundreds of South Australian workers each year.

Mr Beasley said HSRs made workplaces safer and more accountable.

‘Every workplace has the right to elect a HSR, and it’s the HSR who gets to choose their training provider, not their employer,’ he said.

‘We make sure that our health and safety reps can identify hazards, assess risk and what controls you can put in place to eliminate or if not possible, minimise that risk so that people aren’t harmed.

Safe Work Month gives everyone a chance to think about what safety in the workplace means, focusing on the psychological as well as the physical and also having conversations about what having a HSR means for their workplace.’

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