A Primary Prevention approach to Occupational Health and Psychosocial Safety with Fiona McCarthy

    In S 5 E 15 I am delighted to welcome Fiona McCarthy to the podcast. Fiona is an occupational therapist by background specialising in workplace injury management and return to work. After her career in Occupational Therapy, Fiona became interested in primary prevention of workplace injury. She pursued post-graduate studies in Ergonomics , Safety and Health and Latrobe University. Since then, Fiona has worked in Safety and Wellbeing roles in Government, Higher Education and Health and Aged Care. she hold accreditation as a certified OHS professional and is a full member of the Human Factors Society of Australia.
       In this conversation Fiona tells me more about her career trajectory leading to the work she does now consulting in job design, workflow and assisting workplaces with a proactive and primary prevention based approach to psychosocial safety. The core part of this episode focusses on psychosocial hazards and risk, what we mean by these terms and why this matters. Fiona breaks down her approach with some real world examples and very practical pearls. In particular she shares an example of excellent proactive practice in Tasmanian Bakeries, which was a finalist in this year's AIHS awards for best WHS Health and Wellbeing Program. In the final part of the conversation we discuss emerging research on the role of routine work stress as a contributor to psychosocial risk and the relevance of this to frontline responder roles in health and emergency services. Throughout this episode Fiona shares some excellent resources, linked below. Thank you Fiona for your optimistic, evidence and action-driven approach to occupational health, safety and wellbeing.

Links / References/ Resources:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiona-mccarthy-75387abb/
https://www.workps.au
https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-02/Psychological-health-in-the-workplace_Snapshot_February2024.pdf https://www.aphirm.org.au https://learn.fwc.gov.au/local/catalogue_search/module_overview.php?id=13 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3974929/ https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/publications/employee-well-being-outcomes-from-individual-level-mental-health-interventions-cross-sectional-evidence-from-the-united-kingdom/
https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/BDI20_Workplace_Mental-Health_Toolkit.pdf?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mental%20Health%20Toolkit%20Download&

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