Helping employees return to work after long-term absence is one of the biggest challenges facing health and safety practitioners today, with less than a third of them feeling confident about their ability to meet it.
Just 30 per cent of employed practitioners and 36 per cent of self-employed consultants who took part in IOSH and SHP’s Salary and Attitudes Survey 2009 said they feel “very prepared” to facilitate people’s return to the workplace after sickness absence. This is despite the huge emphasis on the subject by the Government — in the form of Dame Carol Black’s review of the health of the working population — the HSE, and other stakeholder organisations, including IOSH itself.
The Institution’s policy and technical director, Richard Jones, said the finding confirms the need for more training in this area. He told SHP: “We know that good work is good for health and well-being, and that many of the barriers to return to work are organisational and not clinical, so IOSH sees an enhanced role here for trained health and safety practitioners, who could act as workplace advocates, educating and advising managers, and helping to spot problems early and ensure prompt action.”
To this end, IOSH is currently piloting, with DWP support, a training course for health and safety professionals to equip them to play a more active role in workplace health issues. According to Jones, feedback so far has been very positive and encouraging. He said: “If the final evaluation shows the pilot has been a success, we are hoping to roll the course out nationally, creating a critical mass of thousands of practitioners able to make a real difference.”
Other key challenges highlighted by respondents to the survey, which was carried out by IOSH and SHP in March/April this year, were the economic downturn (65 per cent of employed practitioners and 57 per cent of self-employed consultants revealed concerns about such issues as businesses cutting corners to save costs, budget and funding cuts for training and equipment, fewer job opportunities, and increased workloads due to redundancies); the negative media portrayal of the profession, which was felt to be a problem by 30 per cent of respondents (see earlier story); and communicating health and safety messages in the workplace, which 29 per cent said was a real difficulty for them.
There was some optimism in the face of the ‘credit crunch’, however, with 21 per cent of employed practitioners believing their status would be enhanced as a result of their bosses appreciating the benefits that well-managed health and safety can bring to the bottom line, and 14 per cent of consultants convinced that the downturn could actually be good for business. Only 32 per cent in employment were concerned about losing their jobs, although more than half overall (54 per cent) figured they would be expected to take on extra duties and work longer hours.
A more detailed analysis of the survey findings will be published in the Interface section of the October issue of SHP, and in the Interface section of this website at the beginning of that month.
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.
