0:00
Hi.
My name's Kim Burton and I'm a
freelance occupational health
researcher doing some work with
the University of Huddersfield.
I've been asked to talk
about the psychosocial flags
framework with a focus on
overcoming obstacles to work.
Now, I'm fully aware that this
series is about back pain,
but I'm not going to talk
about back pain specifically.
I think probably at some
point, I will mention it,
but I'm focusing on the world of
work, not the world of back pain.
0:34
Work is what defines us.
It's what we do.
It's the second question
you ask somebody in the pub.
What's your name?
What do you do?
0:45
There's an interface
between work and health.
And the traditional
occupational health paradigm
sees work as something that can
produce some sort of trauma which
will lead to injury or disease.
So the concept is that work is
hazardous, it affects the worker,
and will do harm.
The focus is all on a causal
relationship between work
and the outcome, which
is injury or disease.
It's a totally reasonable concept
and it applies to lots of things,
but it doesn't explain
everything that we see.
1:24
Safety versus health has
conflicting paradigms.
We've got a health and
safety executive which tries
to combine the two things together.
The idea is that if we can
reduce the risks of work,
we're going to prevent the harm.
And that's a lovely paradigm.
And it works for things
like safety, such as falls
from height and the such like.
And it's a paradigm that also
works for occupational disease
where you've got a clear cause and
effect relationship, for instance,
exposure to hazardous substances.
However, the paradigm does
not work for a lot of other
important work-related conditions.
And actually, it impedes
our understanding
of this health and work interface.
And that's quite a
lot of what I'm going
to talk about over the next while.
