A lecturer in Birmingham has urged business leaders and safety professionals to go much further in promoting healthier lifestyles, by helping to tackle the scourge of accidents occurring outside of work, as well as in the workplace.
The lecture: “Building safe communities: enhancing the business contribution” was given by Professor Richard Parish, non-executive director of Public Health England at the sixth Allan St John Holt Memorial Lecture on 22 October, at the Crowne Plaza, NEC in Birmingham.
Professor Parish, said: “Historically, occupational safety and health has made a massive contribution to the health and wellbeing of Britain’s population. Yet there are still challenges, including tackling occupational cancer and respiratory disease, managing occupational road risk and reducing work-related musculoskeletal disorders and stress.
“For too long the huge spectre of more than 3 million serious accidental injuries annually has been overshadowed by other medical priorities, largely because they are not a problem addressed by clinical interventions. Yet the impact of accidental injury on our critically over-stretched NHS is crippling.
“Accidents affect the young disproportionately, and as such are the biggest cause of ‘preventable years of life lost’. And because it is cheap, accident prevention is one of the most cost-effective public health measures we can invest in as a nation.”
Parish challenged the audience to consider their potential leadership roles in public health as a whole, from outreach work with local communities to supporting LASER (Learning about Safety by Experiencing Risk) centres.
Tom Mullarkey, chief executive of RoSPA, said: “We know that the huge problems of accidental injury and ill-health are growing. We see that health and safety is besieged on all sides by critics who cannot — or will not — engage with these serious issues and instead seek to deride this vital contribution to society; so it is time to come out fighting.
“Health and safety professionals need to reinvent their image and impact by taking their vast reservoir of knowledge on how to keep people safe and healthy, out into the community.”
What makes us susceptible to burnout?
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
