Berry Street
Debra Smith, Head of Work Health and Safety, Berry Street: Berry Street is a not-for-profit organisation that provides care for vulnerable children, families and young people. So at Berry Street we have about fourteen hundred staff.
Warrick Remilton, Regional Director, Western Region, Berry Street: We have lots of challenging behaviours that our staff work with from time to time. There’s lots of occupational violence and aggression and vicarious trauma, which I think would be the two biggest risks, especially in our front facing work in residential care.
Debra: We had such a massive problem of workplace injuries, we just didn’t know what to do with people. I think everyone had just felt overwhelmed with the problem. We decided a bit of structure goes a long way. We have built the program from there and it’s been hugely successful.
We have an incident reporting system so when something happens in the workplace, our injury management consultants will triage every incident. They will make contact with our staff member and they will make decisions about what sort of support they need.
So that can range from psychological support, so we have partnered with FBG under our critical incident recovery model and we make sure that staff are given psychological support, within about twenty-four to forty-eight hours of an incident.
Sometimes we will offer our staff member a day or two of discretion relief so that they can get some natural recovery. We know that after traumatic events people just need some time away from the workplace, just to give themselves a bit of time to rest.
Jayne Lilfo, Residential Care Worker, Berry Street: I don’t even think I requested to have time off. They were like, you need to rest, you need to get everything in line to make sure you are okay. From day dot I was just supported all the way through, even before work cover came into it.
Christopher Hamilton, Insurance Broker, WTW: It does need to be individualised. It is one of the things Berry Street do really, really well is that they don’t apply a cook cutter approach to any of their claims. So whenever an injury comes through, it’s shaped by the person that brings that injury through and what they went through as well.
Jayne: Higher management, supervisor, team leaders, everybody checking in. I can’t think of one step in the process where Berry Street weren’t there. I remember my mum saying to me, how well supported I was. I remember she made note of saying to me you are very, very looked after. I worked in supporting case management and now I’m full-time in admin, which is wonderful.
Debra: We know it’s working because our premium is coming down. We are seeing a reduction in a number of claims year on year. We know through our staff survey that staff are feeling really supported through the program. We are always looking for ways to improve, because our staff come in and do very challenging work and I think we owe them the opportunity to recover.
Kmart
Conor Duffy, National Injury and Wellbeing Manager, Kmart: Kmart is a retail store. We have got over three hundred and twenty outlets across Australia and New Zealand. We have got forty-four thousand team members, so we actually feel we have a huge responsibility, to the communities that we work in, to provide excellence in injury management.
It’s really important for us and to know that our team members do feel valued. So, if an incident happens in store, we have got first aiders trained onsite who will respond as soon as possible and obviously escalate to triple zero if required. We also have return to work coordinators based at every site.
We have got a great network of nurse on-call services who can assist with immediate triage, twenty-four seven. Then we have a network of doctors and physios that can help with that kind of immediate recovery. Our early intervention team, which is based in our nation office in Mulgrave, they are helping from the get-go. So they are on the phone to the store, to the team member and to the doctor within the first hour of an incident occurring, as best as possible.
Jacinta Lamont, Return to Work Coordinator, Kmart: I did have a team member unfortunately who did have a right shoulder injury. We log an incident report so that everyone is notified of the injury. We contact the early intervention advisors for you know, initial advice and they can recommend suitable duties.
The most important thing is that we really want to make sure they are still at work because we know that is the best outcome for them. We have an injury care program that is twenty-four seven, that sites can utilise so they can get the right advice to see if self-management is applicable, or if they need to seek further medical treatment.
Tina Digiacomo, In-Store Host, Kmart: I had an injury end of last year, lifting heavy clothing to put on our racks. Support has been fantastic. Jordan would call me if not every week, every second week and he used to come in to do store visits as well, to see how I was progressing.
The support to actually see how you are progressing, to get you back to work, I think is really important. I was glad to get back to full-time and seeing everybody and just being part of a team again. I think that was what I was lacking and missing the most is being part of our team basically.
Jordan Kete, Injury and Wellbeing Advisor, Kmart: One of the values that Kmart has as a business is to take care. So the health and safety team decided to latch onto that specifically and I guess morph it into our own kind of guiding principles, that help us with day-to-day decision making.
That’s where we came up with the slogan of care. It stands for compassion, being attentive, rehabilitation and empowering as well. We reflect on those four particular words that help guide our day-to-day and what we need to be doing to help out stores and into team members with their recoveries.
Conor Duffy: We are going to say hey someone had been hurt and we need to help them and that ultimately has I think impacted a lot of lives really positively. I dare say it has stopped injuries from occurring because we are all taking that human-led preventative approach, before an incident even happens.