Browsing: Health and mental wellbeing | Page 11

Workers denying not getting enough sleep, and fearing being exposed as having sleep issues, are two of four barriers that need to be addressed to implement an effective sleep health program for white-collar workers, the authors of a global study say.

Union members across all states and territories will proactively block the transportation and use of certain silica-containing materials under a national WHS ban agreed on today.

Employers need to be more strategic when planning work schedules and rest times to "reduce physical and mental overload", according to safety experts, who found the widespread problem of lower back pain tends to build up across consecutive work days.

Court Services Victoria (CSV) has been convicted and ordered to pay nearly $400,000 in penalties, in relation to a toxic workplace culture that contributed to the suicide death of a lawyer and to other workers taking stress leave.

SafeWork NSW has outlined a range of workplace factors that increase the risk of s-xual harassment, and explained what businesses can do to prevent it, in its inaugural four-year Respect at Work Strategy.

The extended use of work-related electronic communication (WREC) during non-work hours worsens fatigue and depression and results in unhealthily high levels of alertness before bed, according to researchers, who advise promoting the "right to disconnect".

Unsafe job demands are the most common psychosocial hazards in Australian workplaces, and employers must explore multiple measures to safeguard against the risk to a reasonably practicable extent, a Comcare director says.

An increasingly diverse and multigenerational workforce, and socioeconomic changes since the global COVID-19 pandemic, mean "monolithic" mental health strategies "just won't cut it anymore", the CEO of Beyond Blue says.

In an important workers' compensation test case, a tribunal has stressed that firefighters can be exposed to carcinogens in multiple circumstances, and found a former firefighter with prostate cancer is protected by presumptive provisions.

New evidence suggests workplace managers can do a better job at screening workers for mental health issues than traditional screening tools, which have questionable benefits for mental health, according to trauma experts from the UK and Australia.