What motivates you in your career?
I am in interested in what can make us unwell and what we can do about it. I first pursued this as a researcher, completing a Bachelor of Biotechnology then a PHD in Microbiology. I found drilling down into the depths of a problem is very satisfying but unfortunately it wasn’t translating to application within the real world. I wanted to apply what I knew to a field where I could help people to be safer and hopefully still get to learn things along the way. So, I ended up working in occupational hygiene, which is identifying, assessing and mitigating workplace exposures to hazards like dust, noise or chemicals. My area of expertise is mycology (the study of fungi), public health microbiology and environmental health.
What is something you would like to see change, or that you are currently working to change in your industry or area of expertise?
There is not a lot of solid guidance on mould and bacteria in buildings and workplaces, as most regulations are related to food and water. So the advice people often receive about it can be extremely varied and polarising which makes it difficult to communicate risks. Working towards demystifying building health, mould and pathogens is a big part of my role and I see huge opportunity to improve health by applying occupational hygiene at the beginning of projects in high-risk settings like construction and renovations in hospitals, where the control of mould and dust is critical to protecting vulnerable populations. All too often in occupational hygiene are exposures identified and controlled after they’re already occurring rather than before they happen.
How would this change impact people or society?
When things are tangible, measurable, and controllable, the world becomes a much less scary place. No one likes to imagine that they can get sick just by walking through a building or turning up to work. Proactively identifying problems to look after our health and safety should be a core part of workplace health and safety and having understandable, practical advice to support that is even better. That proactive look forward doesn’t stop at the end of a Safe Work Method Statement. A recent publication in Nature concluded that more than half of all pathogenic diseases could be worsened by climate change. In an occupational setting this goes even further with added chances of heat stress on workers wearing personal protective equipment, to even needing to modify the environmental controls we’ve used for over 100 years. Looking forward to these forks in the road is critical to being Future Ready, we can’t just copy and paste the same old recommendations and expect they’ll keep working forever.
What are some of the barriers to this change, and how are you/your team working around them?
Safety is often seen as a cost to a business, but not taking those steps is gambling with a much bigger price tag. The immense cost to a business and more importantly to a family by an injury or death is likely to far exceed the cost of implementing good occupational hygiene and safety frameworks at the outset of a project. Proactively finding ways we can engage with stakeholders in those high-risk settings is currently a slow burn, but infections in patients due to construction and renovation works can be critically damaging, with an estimated 5000 deaths a year due to works in these settings. Embedding a culture of zero harm will take some time to fully realise, but ultimately, I hope that the future is full of workplaces where safety processes are embraced and enacted.
