Occupational Health

It is relatively easier to spot potential safety hazards in a place like a building site than say a shopping centre for instance. On a construction site you might be hit by a falling object, become a falling object yourself, get injured by malfunctioning equipment,  have years of breathing in demolition dust or have something non-lethal like industrial deafness. Many die and are seriously injured every year in construction accidents.

The truth is that potential occupational health and safety hazards exist in all work places. Take sick -building- syndrome (SBS) for instance, a big part of SBS is inefficient and contaminated air conditioning systems, after about 20 years they  become very difficult if not impossible to keep bacteria and virus free. Buildings are literally constructed around air conditioning systems, to fully replace such a system can be enormously expensive which can make it completely impractical even if it is possible.

The main air con shafts that movie stars crawl through in action flicks divide into many narrower ribbed ducted tributaries that service smaller spaces- quite impossible to get in there and clean. Nowhere is this more serious than in our hospitals, infection control gets progressively more difficult mainly for this reason. Health ministers are either averse to publicly acknowledge this or more worryingly, they might not even know.

How many of us work in air conditioned buildings?

Some OH&S statistics are quite shocking and surprising, did you know nurses are more likely to get assaulted than police in their place of work?, particularly in casualty units on Friday and Saturday nights by drunk patients. Then their are stress issues affecting your health at work, during the implementation phase of the GST workers at the Taxation Office took record levels of stress leave because of the changes. More soldiers have died from suicide after returning from Afghanistan than who actually died in the field fighting because of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Occupational health and safety hazards take many forms.

I ponderered on numerous occassions what the healthiest occupation might be and I thought that being a Yoga teacher would go close, doing Yoga all day- what could be healthier than that? I thought that right up until I treated a Yoga teacher who told me that the yoga was fine but going around to each student trying to correct their technique was often quite difficult because of the awkward postures she would often find herself in doing this, especially in beginners classes.

If you do any job long enough and apply yourself to it, in some way it can undermine your health.

We have come a long way since child miners died of black lung and asbestos workers were expected to toil without protective gear but our new jobs have new OH&S challenges and we cannot rely on the workers compensation system to protect our interests like we used to. Changes to the Work Cover act several years ago has made compensation for work place injury and illness much harder than it once was, we really do have to take care of ourselves in the work place.

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