SafeWork SA reveals winners of Safe Work Month competition

As a part of National Safe Work Month, SafeWork SA’s annual Organise Your Own Workplace Activity competition invited workplaces to share some of their creative and industry-specific initiatives in building and maintaining safe and health workplaces. Businesses were invited to register a workplace event for the month of October, with 26 South Australian businesses registering events.

Workplace activities registered were creative and original, including a training passport, hazard identification, mock court scenarios, a focus on mental health and wellbeing through activities, and a scavenger hunt.

Six businesses were recognised for their workplace safety initiatives held during National Safe Work Month, awarded with either gold, silver or bronze awards. Assessment of all registered events looked at originality of idea, relevance to health and safety and to their industry, promotion of events, and workplace engagement. Martyn Campbell, Executive Director of SafeWork SA, commended the South Australian businesses that registered and participated in the 2020 competition.

“This year has been a challenging year for businesses, and now more than ever it is important to keep workplace health and safety at the forefront of people’s mind. I have been impressed with the creativity and bespoke nature of the winning entries for this year’s competition,” said Campbell.

Gold award winner Sutterby Electrical focused on the link between diet and mental health, with presentations from physical and mental health specialists. Silver award winner Master Builders SA asked its apprentices to provide a safety motto, to get them thinking about what makes a workplace safe and how to keep safe whilst on the job. Korvest received the bronze award for providing free, onsite and confidential worker health checks for its workers. The checks included blood profiling with a Cardiochek machine (‘pin prick’ test), lipid profile cholesterol (total CHOL) and blood sugar (GLUC).

IKEA received the gold award for its month-long safety awareness campaign that promoted different topics each week, with special focus on different departments in the organisation. This allowed staff to nominate safety champions and offer prizes to make the activities fun and engaging.

RAA took out the silver award for producing its own in-house safety video, addressing risks and issues encountered by staff. McLaren Vintners had a snake catcher speak about snake awareness, identification of different types of snakes, first aid, and how to be safe if you come into contact with a snake. For this, it received the bronze award.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Dmitriy