Workplace Health For Medicare: Managing Health And Security Policies At Workplace

Importance of Workplace Safety Policies

Discuss about the Workplace Health for Medicare.

As a small healthcare organization, yet an emerging one in the industry, Medicare has emerged to be an organization that has gained much popularity in Australia. However, it has been observed that the organization does not have an effective management of the health and security policies at workplace that is not only demotivating the employees, but has been highly responsible for the potential risks of injuries of the workers and the ill health condition of the same. Hence, the organization has decided to take up necessary steps required for the adoption and the effective management of the workplace health and safety policies at Medicare.

First of all, while formulating the workplace policies of the organization, the health and safety policies as dictated by the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) will be taken into consideration. The Workplace Health and Safety Act of Australia mandate the importance of the business leaders to ensure a series of workplace safety policies that ensure the health and well-being of the employees (Swift et al., 2014). The regulations of the WHS authorities will be first of all taken into consideration, for identifying and assessing the workplace hazards of Medicare, such as noise, machinery or even manual handling. After identifying the risks, and evaluating the obligations of the organization towards the well-being of its employees, the risk policies will be formulated. Next, the formulated risk policies will be communicated with the respective stakeholders that will primarily consist of the investors and the employees working under each department of the organization. As far as the investors and the managerial group of stakeholders are concerned, periodical meetings and interactive sessions will be arranged for communicating the importance of a healthcare organization to comply with the WHS Act of 2004 (Talbot, 2016). These meetings and interactive session will help in encouraging the active and enthusiastic participation of the stakeholders, especially the investors, in the implementation of the workplace procedures. Again, once the formulated policies for assessing and eliminating workplace risks are being approved for implementation by the higher authority, the next step should be to communicate the policies to the respective employees. Hence, group sessions as well as rounds of practical demonstration will be organized for creating awareness among the employees regarding the potential risks at workplace, and the means of avoiding the same.

It is not sufficient to make the employees aware about the policies to be implemented, it is also important to check their level of comprehension by asking them about the implication of the risk policies or asking them to identify the important equipments.  Once the workplace health and safety records are being collected, the records must be properly filed as well as arranged for ensuring convenient access in future. The workplace health and safety records may be stored locally in a specific file or folder, or may be stored electronically in the form of a hardcopy, but wherever these are stored, the records must follow a sequential numeric or alphabetical series for storage (Reese, 2015). As per the legal requirements of the WHS records handling guidelines, the records will be stored or granted access.

Formulation of Risk Policies

The workplace health and safety policies must be regularly reviewed so as to ensure that the policies are effectively followed at workplace, as well as to incorporate new policies for newly identified risks. For reviewing the policies, the health and safety representatives should be asked to participate in a one-to-one session, whereby they may be asked whether all the control measures are working properly, or if the introduction of new methods, equipments or chemicals has made the job of the employees safer (Mogensen, 2015). In case the risks, especially the serious ones are still found to occur, the control measures of the same will be reviewed ad re-formulated.

A mix of the consultation and participative methods for the identification of the health and safety requirements at the workplace should be adopted. First of all, as part of the consultation program, the organization should arrange seminars and workshops consisting of risk analysts and volunteers making the employees aware regarding the nature or impact of the potential risks at workplace. The “toolbox talks” will be the most effective here. On the other hand, as part of the participative method of consultation, the organization will consider the idea of sending regular newsletters via emails to make the employees aware about the existent policies of occupational safety, and asking them to provide suggestions on improving the same.

For the effective resolution of workplace policies raised through consultation, Medicare must ensure that a particular health and workplace representative be chosen for resolving the risk or a hazard as soon as it is reported to occur. For the effective resolution of the hazard, the representative must understand the number of the employees affected by the risks, or who is responsible for overseeing the hazard (Bahr, 2014).

The occupational health and safety plan is an integral part of the occupational health policies of the organization, and the same is being given as follows:

• The organization intends to identify and assess the impact of the occupational health risks, so as to ensure maximum well-being of the employees
• The health and safety policies intend to safeguard the lives of the stakeholders from any kind of potential risk or hazard at workplace, and must be strictly followed
• Medicare offers periodical training sessions to its employees for encouraging the personal development of the employees and the employees are expected to participate
• All the employees should follow the rules of the Workplace Safety Handbooks, as handed out to them on their joining date (Carayon et al., 2015).

The information regarding the feedback should be communicated from the consultation to the employees, and hence the co-operation among the managers and the employees should be promoted. Once the views of the employees regarding the workplace health and safety are being considered, the managers should communicate back to the staffs regarding the decisions being made and the reason behind the same.

In order to ensure that the record keeping is being done in a proper way the responsibility is to be assigned to a highly skilled manager or senior administrative officer, so that the records can be properly maintained as well as retained. For identifying the implications of the proposed changes, the workplace guidelines must be evaluated. Besides, a survey should be conducted on the employees to analyze the response of the employees regarding the workplace health and safety policies. The required knowledge and skills of the experts must involve a deep understanding of the hazard identification and elimination procedures, and a clear understanding of the WHS codes of workplace safety.

Communication with Stakeholders

It is important to train the employees of Medicare about the methods of identifying and analyzing the risks and hazards at workplace. The employees will have to compulsorily participate in the intensive training sessions that will help them understand the health risk assessment science in a comprehensive way (Qasim et al., 2014). Besides, the training sessions will also help to enlighten the students regarding the potential health consequences of each of the workplace hazards and the ways of resolving the risks.

In the process of identifying and analyzing the risks, each of the stakeholders should be encouraged to participate. First of all, the investors must come up to invest in the important areas (such as the purchase of new equipments or preventive measures so that it can involve workplace risks, and may affect the well-being of the employees (Vieria et al., 2015). Again, the employees should be well-trained so that they can learn how to identify and eliminate potential risks. Again, since the process of upgrading the risk assessing skills of the employees is a two-way process, the managers should also be involved for motivating the employees.

Reference List:

Bahr, N. J. (2014). System safety engineering and risk assessment: a practical approach. CRC Press.

Carayon, P., Hancock, P., Leveson, N., Noy, I., Sznelwar, L., & Van Hootegem, G. (2015). Advancing a sociotechnical systems approach to workplace safety–developing the conceptual framework. Ergonomics, 58(4), 548-564.

Dickson-Swift, V., Fox, C., Marshall, K., Welch, N., & Willis, J. (2014). What really improves employee health and wellbeing: Findings from regional Australian workplaces. International Journal of Workplace Health Management, 7(3), 138-155.

Forouzanfar, M. H., Alexander, L., Anderson, H. R., Bachman, V. F., Biryukov, S., Brauer, M., … & Cohen, A. (2015). GBD 2013 Risk Factors Collaborators. Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks in 188 countries, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013. Lancet, 386(10010), 2287-323.

Lim, S. S., Vos, T., Flaxman, A. D., Danaei, G., Shibuya, K., Adair-Rohani, H., … & Aryee, M. (2013). A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. The lancet, 380(9859), 2224-2260.

Mogensen, V. (2015). Worker safety under siege: labor, capital, and the politics of workplace safety in a deregulated world. Routledge.

Qasim, M., Bashir, A., Anees, M. M., Ghani, M. U., Khalid, M., Hanan, F., & Malik, J. (2014). Occupational Health, Safety and Risk Analysis in Large Scale Industry of Lahore. Bulletin of Energy Economics (BEE), 2(4), 113-118.

Reese, C. D. (2015). Occupational health and safety management: a practical approach. CRC press.

Talbot, A. (2016). Work Health and Safety Act v Australian Border Force Act: Immigration detention workers caught in the crossfire. Precedent (Sydney, NSW), (135), 22.

Vieira, E. M. A., da Silva, L. B., & Silva, J. M. N. (2015). Analysis of occupational risks: A systematic review from “Bayesian Networks” tools. Occupational Safety and Hygiene III, 39.