Importance of Workplace Health and Safety

Dear colleagues, welcome to the Workplace Health and Safety blog of Navitas Professional Services. This blog has been created to promote health and safety practices in the workplace. Everyone is encouraged to participate and share their concerns or suggestions in the blog to make the workplace safer and healthier. Some of the benefits of a safe and healthy workplace environment include increased job satisfaction, higher performance, greater productivity, improved health and wellbeing, lower workers’ compensation premiums, faster return to work, less workplace injury, lower absenteeism rates, increased individual and team resilience, greater work participation and increased social inclusion.

A healthy and safe workplace can be created by;

1. Intervening early and knowing the warning signs

2. Good working Design

3. Workplace Health and Safety Management Systems

1. Intervening early and knowing the warning signs

The earlier you notice an employee is experiencing potential signs of ill health or injury, the sooner you can take steps to help them. Acting early is critical to the recovery process. Early intervention is about acting early to minimise the impact and duration of emerging symptoms or actual injury or illness and provides appropriate treatment and support to employees.

2. Good working Design

One of the best ways to prevent and control workplace injuries is to minimise hazards early in the idea planning and design phase. Good work design, or safety in design, considers hazards and risks as early as possible in the planning and design process. It aims to eliminate or minimise the possibility of workplace injury or illness throughout the life of the product or process.

3. Workplace Health and Safety Management Systems

A workplace health and safety management system is a set of policies, procedures and plans that systematically manages health and safety at work and can help to minimise the risk of injury and illness from workplace operations. Workplace health and safety management system is much more than simply having safety-related forms and policies in place and documented procedures. Rather, it is about achieving the measures and contents of the safety documentation in an ongoing and managed way.