Health and Wellness

A lot has changed over the past two years, and it’s no surprised that we have all to navigate to these challenges at work and at home.

Keeping physically active is vital for our better health and wellness as the COVID-19 pandemic has made a great impact on all areas of our life.

The December Safety Bulletin focuses on everyone’s health and wellness. We need to be physically, emotionally, and mentally ready for any challenges that we may encounter. The theme for December’s safety bulletin highlights us to keep physically active for our better health and wellness.

Get Physically Active

When it comes to physically getting active, there are different exercise recommendations that we can all aim to do starting from slow pace to vigorous pace.

• 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity (aim for at least 15 to 20 minutes of exercises), and
• Muscle-strengthening activities at least weekly depending on your schedule.

Being active at these levels can reduce heart disease and boost our general health and mental health. Sample exercises are included in this bulletin topic.

Encourage Self-Care

Self-care is always overlooked as we are always busy looking after someone else or a member of our family and we tend to forget to look after ourselves. It is important to practice self-care occasionally for your general health and most especially for your mental wellness.

It is important that we are managing our stress, we are getting sufficient sleep, adopting healthy habits, and practicing mindfulness.

Reach Out to Support Network

To allow for general health and wellness, reach out to support network or clubs that has your similar interests to interact. This can be in the form of any hobbies, sports, and other social activities. Such activities include cooking, gardening, or photography. Most importantly reach out to families and friends for support and guidance.

There may be different tools available for health and wellness, sharing this information to all of you for your information.

Happy Holidays!

The Safety Bulletin for November focuses on the workplace hazards that create risks or harm to psychological (mental) health and that is known as psychosocial hazards. These hazards can cause both psychological and physical harm.

The psychosocial hazards come from:

• Work relationships and interactions including bullying, harassment, discrimination, aggression, and violence.
• The equipment, working environment or requirements to undertake duties in hazardous environments, and
• The way the work or job is designed, organized, and managed.

The psychosocial hazards include:

• Violence and aggression
• Poor support
• Lack of role clarity
• Conflict of poor workplace relationships and interactions
• Poor organisational justice
• Poor physical environment.
• Inadequate reward and recognition
• Traumatic events, and others.

It is important to identify, assess and control psychosocial hazards and the associated risks in the same way as the physical hazards and risks.

The process for eliminating or minimizing psychosocial health and safety risks to as low as reasonably practicable is as per the following risk management process.

• Identify the hazards
• Assess the associated risks
• Implement control measures to eliminate or minimise risks, and
• Regularly review control measures to ensure they remain effective.

The diagram identifies the hierarchy of control measures in the management of psychosocial risks.