Sickness absence

The mental shortcuts we use to make judgements could result in us giving more attention to safety risks than to health ones, but being aware of these unconscious biases could lead to more effective interventions.

Health and wellbeing

A tool to assess the true cost of workplace wellbeing interventions is filling in the data gap that has so far undermined the business case for them.

Wellness programmes

"More than 1.1 million people die from work-related accidents or diseases in the Asia Pacific region every year," said IOSH president Vincent Ho as he opened the Asia Pacific Occupational Safety and Health Organization's (APOSHO) 33rd annual conference on 4 December 2018. But delegates were told about initiatives throughout the region to try to curb that total. Ho cited Singapore's Jurong Island Vision Zero Cluster.

Ten years ago, while he was working in the construction sector, Karl Simons decided to concentrate his efforts for OSH improvement below the layers of minor incidents and near-misses in Heinrich’s safety triangle where most OSH practitioners work.

The HSE argued that Apache North Sea’s reduced staffing of the production technicians’ rota on the Beryl Bravo platform, which included using trainees, apprentices and assistants to cover some shifts, had the potential to increase fatigue among staff and reduced also its ability to carry out critical work.

This is an average of 4.1 days per employee and corresponds to a sickness absence rate of 1.9% (the proportion of working hours lost to sickness absence). The average number of sickness absence days taken by UK workers has almost halved from 7.2 days in 1993 when records began, though the rate started to fall overall from 3% in 1999. Absence levels varied between occupations, from a rate of 0.9% for managers and senior officials to 2.8% for those working in caring, leisure and other service occupations.

For EPC-UK, a company with a distributed, ageing, mainly male workforce of nearly 250, the management of occupational ill-health risk is vital.As a leading manufacturer and supplier of commercial explosives (see "EPC-UK" box below) for the UK mining, quarrying and aggregate sectors, EPC’s employees are scattered over eight locations from Shetland to Cornwall and their work is demanding.