Is health promotion a workplace safety matter?

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I have undertaken work for companies that promote wellness and good health in workplaces.  The companies provide health assessments for a range of conditions, health advice, fitness services and assessments, and a redesigned staff canteen for healthier food.  All of these initiatives are worthwhile but they have not been embraced by the wider workplace safety sector.

Part of this reason is that OHS professionals focus on the hazards to workers that are generated by the workplace or the work undertaken.  Getting fat is not necessarily a workplace hazard although recent evidence in the United Kingdom shows that a sedentary occupation, for instance sitting in front of VDU, can lead to obesity. (Any parent with a teenage boy and a games console would already know the link).  OHS tends to focus on the controllable hazards that are generated by the workplace, such as amputations, dust, noise, manual handling, forklifts, falling, etc.  

It has only just begun to deal with psychosocial hazards of fatigue, bullying, violence and stress. These hazards have been given high priority because they have a high workers’ compensation cost and have a negative flow-on to other workers and the organisation in general. But how have obesity, diabetes and cholesterol become workplace hazards? 

This seems to be the position put forward by the Victorian Government with its launch of its WorkHealth strategy.  It has allocated $A600 million over five years to tackle these new workplace hazards that until last week were being handled by the public health boffins and health promoters in the Department of Human Services. 

Geoff Fary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions told me last week that the ACTU supports wellness initiatives that identify and prevent disease but is more comfortable with work-related disease than non-work-related diseases that may affect work performance.  He also stated that wellness initiatives should never be considered as substitutes for a “rigorous OHS regime”.

There are many questions about the actual funding of the program. Is the $A600 million from surplus workers’ compensation premiums, or is it from the interest generated from the WorkCover funds?  Who initiated this program given that the Victorian WorkCover Authority or the health promotion authorities gave no hint of its development?  Is it a folly of some senior bureaucrat?  Is it an ill-conceived way of blending public health and workplace health initiatives? 

What can be said is that the wellness industry is jumping up and down in anticipation of a government-backed opening of a new front in the fight against obesity.  But why divert attention from the successful community campaign the government has run on workplace safety over the last 10 years?  Why confuse the message by now making obesity an occupational hazard?  

Wellness programs improve the general health of the community with the secondary benefit that good personal health leads to a healthier and more productive workforce.  This established perspective has now been switched by the Victorian government. 

As well as making sure that workers go home alive, business will now have to send them home thin.  At least thin commuters take up less room on the overcrowded public transport.

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Filed under OHS, health, wellness, workplace