Chronic pain management critical to retaining workers

Australian workers struggling to manage chronic pain need to regain control over their lives, says Coralie Wales, President of the Chronic Pain Association of Australia.

The good news is they can gain control with community help, she says in an interview.

CORALIE WALES, President of Chronic Pain Australia

One in five people suffer chronic pain – pain that’s experienced on a daily basis in excess of three to six months — and one in 10 will report that pain is interfering with their lives, which means it might be affecting their ability to work, says Ms Wales.

Also, research shows that the chemistry of stress can make the experience of pain from an injury worse, paving the way for the likelihood of chronic pain.

“We know that people stop going to work because of pain and are less effective at work,” she says.

Research shows that Australia loses five billion dollars every year in reduced work productivity due to chronic pain in workers — a big number given the ageing workforce and skills shortage

People aged between 35 and 55 years can have two or more chronic conditions. When they suffer an injury, the problem becomes complex.

“Managing that pain is really important and retaining those workers is critical because as a nation, we need those numbers in our work force.”

Ms Wales will be speaking at the Annual National Workers Compensation Conference on 23-26 February 2009 in Melbourne.

She will talk about how minor soft tissue injuries can lead to chronic pain and how clinicians and workers will benefit from an understanding of the physiology of chronic pain and how to deal with it.

She will also discuss the need to improve the level of control workers with chronic pain have over their lives.

“That means bringing them into the process and not excluding them from the process of planning in rehabilitation,” Ms Wales says.

“I’ll be touching on the fact that we can produce a circle around injured workers which makes them the leader, rather than the follower…and when we do that it really works, reducing a lot of the game playing that goes on in rehabilitation.”

Ms Wales says research shows the community can play a key role in workers getting back to a position of trusting after possibly years of feeling they haven’t had control because they haven’t trusted what has been going on in their lives in trying to manage pain.

The importance of community is the reason why Chronic Pain Australia exists.

“We’ve developed an organisation which is made up of volunteer consumers of pain management services, just ordinary people who have been through the experience and who have now become a model for other people, and it helps people trust the process of learning how to manage their pain,” she says.

Other speakers attending the conference include Martin Dolan, Chief Executive Officer for Comcare; Jarrod Moran, Workers Compensation Officer for Australian Council of Trade Unions; Dr Peter Tuchin, Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University; Craig Bosworth, Public & Industry Affairs Manager for Medibank Private; and Dr Angelica Vecchio-Sadus, HSE & Site Operations Manager at CSIRO Minerals.

www.nationalworkerscomp.com.au

To arrange a media pass, request more information or arrange speaker interviews please contact:

Nigel Dique
Informa-IIR 02 9080 4108; 0423 024 819; nigel.dique@informa.com.au

Focus on expectations key to worker retention

Miners and other employers in the Pilbara are advised that in attracting talent they should make sure they position the role to appeal to people with different expectations.

Those who want to stay a few years for example and seek residential-community living have different expectations from the fly-in-fly out (FIFO) cohort, or from those intent on building a career.

“For residential, it’s important to promote the strong community and sporting benefits of regional towns in the northwest,” Ashley McKinnon, Director, Resources & Energy for Hudson told delegates at the Mining the Pilbara conference in June.

“These include the fishing, sailing, scuba diving and camping opportunities. At the same time companies need to manage the expectation gap around issues like house rental rates and day-care availability.

“The options for FIFO may include flights from a range of towns, shift rosters that cater for couples or are best practice in terms of providing time off.

“Building a picture of the scale of operations and projects in the northwest (particularly green fields projects) is attractive to candidates looking to build on their career.

“For them, look at career development options, rotation on projects, mentoring, work flexibility through roster design and flexible work cycles for day workers, and benefits on par with best practice in the mining industry.

“Many candidates also now have the ability to fly in from other environments such as south west Australia, and while this does not help build the residential community it does address the labour pool shortage.”

Mr McKinnon said that understanding what it is about companies and projects that attracts the right type of candidate would pay dividends in positioning the company to get the best talent.

However, he warned: “Make sure that what you promise will actually be fulfilled, otherwise you risk having them leave or being poached by other companies looking for similar talent.

“The most important issue is to develop and maintain a positive corporate culture that values teamwork, employee development, sustainable work practices and equality, particularly with younger workers.”

Mining was not a global market so talent pools for labour were global, particularly in engineering disciplines and some trades. Skilled professionals were increasingly being sought from countries like South Africa, South America, Canada and Central Europe.

In Australia there was a lot of movement between Queensland, South Australia, the Hunter Valley, the eastern goldfields and the Pilbara. More effort was being made to develop indigenous talent pools in cooperation with aboriginal corporations and the families of existing workers.

The workforce composition had changed in the Pilbara. A large number of older skilled workers were retiring and being replaced by younger workers with high expectations and able to access information easily, and skilled workers from different cultural backgrounds.

He predicted at least five years of labour shortages only partially addressed through 457 visa skilled workforce migration.