October is National Safe Work Month – are you doing enough?

Did you know that October is National Safe Work Month? An initiative of Safe Work Australia, National Safe Work Month is a time to commit to building a safe and healthy workplace for you and your colleagues.

To manage your occupational health and safety (OHS) obligations, and reduce the risks in your practice, you must:

• Identify hazards in your workplace, e.g. trip hazards, electrical hazards and ergonomic hazards.
• Assess the severity of the risks posed by those hazards, e.g. do any of the hazards pose a severe risk of serious injury?
• Implement risk control measures to eliminate or reduce the risks as far as reasonably practicable, e.g. removing cords from the floor to eliminate the risk of a trip.

Education and training is also a powerful tool, as often risks will arise from work practices. For instance, dentists and other dental professionals suffer musculoskeletal complaints resulting from their work practices, such as tasks that require awkward postures, repetitive or sustained force, high or sudden force, repetitive movement and exposure to vibration. These generally cause discomfort at different end points – in the neck, low back, shoulders and hand or wrist. In fact, the risk of musculoskeletal injuries is the top OHS risk faced by dentists worldwide!

We are committed to improving OHS outcomes for our members, so we are working towards helping build a training resource to help reduce ergonomic risks in dental practices. In partnership with Productivity Matters (with the support of PSA Insurance), we will be giving 10 dental practices a workplace review using WorkSafe’s OHS Essentials Program. The data collected from these reviews will be used by Productivity Matters to develop the content for the training resource.

Not only will the participating practices be helping us to develop a tool to help combat the risk of musculoskeletal injuries, they will also be receiving a free ergonomic workplace review. And what better time to organise an ergonomic review for your practice than National Safe Work Month?

If you’d like your practice to be involved, register your interest by emailing Mr Nicholas Leong from Productivity Matters at nicholas@promatters.com.au.

For further information, contact ADAVB CPD & Training Manager Ms Caroline Kaur on caroline.kaur@adavb.org.