World Day for Safety and Health at Work
Today is the World Day for Safety and Health at Work and this year’s theme is workplace stress. The modern day workplace is becoming an ever more stressful environment with many factors contributing such as longer working hours, increased competition and higher expectations on performance. Attention is growing on the impact these contributing factors have, making work-related stress a global issue as it can seriously effect health and wellbeing. It has been linked to causing illnesses such as cardiovascular and heart problems, anxiety and other infectious diseases.
With the workplace being the source of this, it makes an ideal venue for these issues to be addressed in order to protect the health and well-being of your workplace and stakeholders.
Stress can have detrimental impacts upon the business, with stressed workers being more likely to be absent and prone to mistakes or injuries due to fatigue. Surveys have shown that in order to cope with stress people turn to things like smoking, gambling and alcohol.
Alcohol consumption is a common coping mechanism for dealing with stress on the short term by making people feel more relaxed. Heavy drinking can have serious effects on health and increase cardiovascular disease. Work performance can suffer as a result of drinking, including absenteeism, inefficiency, poor decision-making, neglect of detail, less quantity of work and more frequent mistakes.
International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that up to 40% of accidents at work involve or are related to alcohol use.
Workplace stress is an issue that should be addressed by all workplaces. The effects it can have on health and performance cannot be ignored, which is why it is good that days like World Day for Safety and Health at Work shine a light on issues like this.
About Randox Testing Services
At Randox Testing Services we offer a complete drugs and alcohol testing service tailored to our client’s requirements. Working with various organisations conducting drug and alcohol testing in Construction, Transport, Manufacturing, Aviation, Safety Critical and Facilities Management industries. We are founded on quality of service and provision of results you can rely on. Services including, sample collection, screening analysis, instant kits, policy consultancy, expert witness, medical review, awareness and collector training.