National Safe Work Month

October is National Safe Work Month – a time to make a commitment to ensure we have a safer workplace for emergency services personnel! It is a time when we celebrate that Australia is one of the safest places in the world to work, but also a time when we all commit to building even safer workplaces. We should always be on the lookout for opportunities to improve the health and safety of our emergency services colleagues and bystanders at accident scenes especially before the scene has been made safe by lane closures and traffic diversions. That is exactly what this campaign is all about! Just like it is in Victoria and South Australia. In recognition of National Safe Work month, I'm setting a goal to reach 25,000 supporters! Which at this time is only 1180 more people! Creating a healthy and safe workplace, no matter where that workplace may find us, is a key goal for all of us, and we should aim to ensure our colleagues, and the people we have come to help, are safe not just during National Safe Work Month but all year round. It’s always good to be reminded about the importance of work health and safety: Work-related injury and disease cost our community $61.8 billion a year. In other words, poor work health and safety costs $5000 per worker each year and equates to 4.1 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product. This doesn’t even touch on the immeasurable cost of grief and trauma to workers and their families. The whole community bears the cost of poor work health and safety decisions. So what can we do, as workers and colleagues, to make our workplaces safer? This October, like me, commit to improving safety in your workplace no matter where that is, be it on a freeway, on dirt road, down a ditch. In fact anywhere that motor vehicle accidents and breakdowns can occur. Get involved by: - Signing the petition and then sharing it with all of your friends and give them the message to do the same. - Join the "Slow Down and Move Over" Facebook Group. - Send an email to the Minister for Roads, Melinda Pavey MP using the email address of: oxley@parliament.nsw.gov.au Let her know how you feel about the "Slow Down and Move Over" initiative and why it is so important that it is brought in as soon as possible, just like it is in Victoria and SA. Safety is everyone’s business, and your knowledge and experience are worth sharing with the Minister so she has a better understanding of how dangerous these incidents can be and why it is so important to introduce these changes. We all want the same thing, and that so each one of us can go home to our loved ones at the end of the day. Thanks for reading and thanks for your support, Michel Mils