Published on 22 April 2022

It is with great pride and excitement that I am able to announce the fantastic outcome for Western Health at last night’s Victorian Worksafe Awards.

These are statewide awards and finalists come from across Victoria and across any industry.

We were nominated for two awards:

  • Commitment to Prevention of Mental Health Injury in the Workplace
    • Our nomination was for the wide range of strategies and actions we had taken around prevention of occupational violence and aggression. Known as the Predict. Prevent. Priority. Safety program, this work also included the implementation of the Behaviours of Concern chart and a range of other measures.
  • Safety Solution of the Year
    • Our nomination (jointly with University of Melbourne) was for the ‘McMonty’ isolation hood, designed by A/Prof Forbes McGain in collaboration with a wonderful team from University of Melbourne Engineering.

In an unprecedented outcome, we won not one, but both of these major awards! I believe this is likely to be the only time a major health service has won two of these awards at the one Worksafe ceremony.

The most important aspect of these wins is that both were directly related to organisational efforts to support the safety of our staff and to prevent occupational violence and aggression in our workplace. Nothing is more important than that and this is why these awards were so gratefully received.

Both awards are an incredible acknowledgement of the huge amount of work the organisation has done to protect our people and to remain focused on this through the challenging two years of COVID.

We were up against extremely tough competition in the Awards and we were all very impressed with the magnificent safety initiatives that had been undertaken by our fellow finalists. The Awards, are statewide and open to all industries and sectors and this also applied to the categories we won. In the Safety Solution category, we were proud to be joint winners alongside an industry safety leader in the high voltage electricity field.

Well done to those who put in the time and effort involved in the submissions and a massive thanks and congratulations to our many colleagues who contributed their time and effort over many months, to carry out the work underpinning those submissions.

I hope we can all take a moment to enjoy these achievements.