The study, presented at the 21st World Congress on Safety and Health at Work this week, claims workers aged 15 to 24 are 40% more likely to get injured than older colleagues.
Speaking at the youth element of the conference held in Singapore, the country’s second minister for manpower, Josephone Teo, said younger workers needed to be better prepared for hazards at work.
Teo also said that millennials could then play a key role in raising awareness of safety and health in the workplace, once educated.
She said that a strong safety culture needed to ‘become ingrained’ – and work was happening to ensure this was the case.
She claimed that the higher rate of incidents was due to a lack of workplace experience, and being temporary or part-time in roles. Teo also claimed that health and safety concerns were ‘far from their minds’.
Teo spoke about the case of a 22 year old worker who accidentally injected fish vaccine into her palm which became a bacterial skin infection resulting in being hospitalised.
The country’s ministry of manpower, responsible for safety in the workplace, found the firm had not trained employees on safety and had inadequate risk assessment and safe working procedures
She said: “You can do your part by practising good safety and health behaviours”.
Teo encouraged the sharing of knowledge and speaking out about witnessing poor practices in the workplace.
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.
This may be the case in Singapore but according to Riddor stats the U.K sees a larger proportion of injuries and fatalities being suffered by men older than 35