Occupational Safety and Health Advocacy

This paper presents a health advocacy strategy on control of infectious diseases infections among acute care nurses in Australia. It discusses various occupational health bodies and strategic frameworks needed for implementing a health advocacy campaign.

Running Head: OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADVOCACY
Occupational Safety and Health Advocacy
Institution
Student name
Date

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Occupational Safety and Health Advocacy
Affected group
Tracey and Stott (2017) define occupational hazards like chemicals, biological or
physical situations, and circumstances that pose a threat to a health worker at the workplace.
These hazards include exposure to infectious diseases, coming into contact with various harmful
chemicals and chemical products, ergonomically injurious situations such as prolonged standing,
lifting objects or repetitive activities and awkward positions. Nurses may also be exposed to
physical harm when they come into contact with radiations from x-rays, lasers and radioisotopes
and violence from peers or patients. Statistics show that acute care nurses, emergency room
practitioners and infection control nurses are the most susceptible to septicity by contagious
diseases such as TB, flu, AIDS, and Ebola (Stephan et al., 2016). This revelation calls for a need
for affirmative action to enhance occupational health safety especially in the areas identified.
This paper, therefore, presents a health advocacy strategy on control of infectious diseases
infections among acute care nurses in Australia. Herein, the author looks at various occupational
health bodies in and out of Australia and the strategic frameworks and procedures needed in
developing and implementing a health advocacy campaign against occupational health hazards
among the said group of healthcare providers.
Key players
Several organizations and bodies both governmental and non-governmental agencies
advocate, implement and enforce occupational health and safety in Australia and across the
globe. These include Australia Asia worker links, Australasian Legal Information Institute,
Centre for Sleep Research (CFSR), National Research Centre for OHS Regulation, The Workers
Health Centre, Victorian Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (VIOSH), SafetyAtWork

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Blog, Work Health Safety (OHS) Leadership for All Group, WorkSafe Victoria, and Safe Work
Australia (SWA).
Group organization
Coming up with a concrete objective-oriented advocacy group is no easy task. Numerous
challenges including financial constraints, conflict of interests, and limited resources are just but
a few of the so many challenges a group faces in initial stages (Sudbury & Okazawa-Rey, 2015).
With the problem already defined, the next step will be establishing the advocacy group which
will influence mobilization activities. The group will then come up with strategic goals and
specific target both for individuals and strata. Further, the group shall scheme an action plan and
a schedule of events. The next step will involve capacity building and identifying partners.
Lastly, the implementation will be rolled out and the results evaluated.
Recruitment methods
Non-profit-making movements need volunteers to participate and drive their agenda.
However, as Stephan et al. (2016) observes, finding and recruiting them has proved quite a
challenge in a number of organizations. Shields (1991) thus suggests 3 methods that have stood
the test of challenges and proven to be effective recruitment methods for volunteers. These
include warm body recruitment, target recruitment, and concentric circles recruitment. To help
plan and lay the advocacy strategy, a small number of volunteers at the top management level
will be recruited through the targeted recruitment method. Since the campaign is a nationwide
movement, each state will require coordinators who will escalate the agenda to the grassroots.
This regional representative will be recruited through concentric circles method. As evident, the
campaign needs a large number of volunteers for a short period of time, a warm body
recruitment approach will be used in the last recruitment phase to recruit these individuals.

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Group Structures
Sound infectious illness control programs, especially among the medical staff, require
that knowledge-based strategies, projects, and framework be set up to respond to arising and
developing risks not only among the public but the nursing staff as well (Moyer et al., 2001). The
advocacy structure shall, therefore, comprise of two major strata of management which are the
core management team and the local leadership. The senior management team shall comprise of
the program manager who will act as the chief executive officer, the treasurer in charge of funds,
the secretary who will be the custodian of all the records and information about the campaign,
and the resource mobilization officer who will support the executive teams efforts in pursuing
donor opportunities from partners, corporations, foundations and the government. Regional
coordinators shall form the administrative layer and shall work in tandem with the executive
office in mobilizing groups, resources, and execution of advocacy activities. Lastly, the
volunteers will take instructions from their respective coordinators and participate in campaign
activities such as awareness creation, events organization, and funds mobilization.
Leadership, facilitation and decision making
The program manager will be the apex leader who will work together with the secretary,
the treasurer, and the resource mobilization officer to form the executive office. The regional
coordinators will report to the project manager and will be in charge of the volunteers. Top level
management decisions shall be escalated downwards from the manager to the volunteers and
feedback from the ground communicated in reverse order.
Goal setting and task allocation processes

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Occupational Safety and Health Advocacy
Goal setting process will involve consultative approach in which the core management
will develop goals and objectives and then engage the administrative strata in negotiations and
reviews before coming up with the final set of goals and their subsequent evaluation procedures.
Sexism and Racism
The group management shall commit to working in a diversified environment with mixed
age groups, genders, and races. The possibility of gender or racism issues cannot be overlooked
as its effects may prove quite detrimental towards the overall agenda of the advocacy campaign
if not well taken care of. First diversity shall be created through recruiting of people from
different cultural backgrounds, sexual orientation, gender, and sexes. However, like Jones, and
May (1995) warn, creating supporting frameworks that ensure harmonious coexistence in a
multicultural environment is the bigger challenge that organizations across the globe continue to
grapple with. The group will, therefore, adopt three key strategies namely the motive forces, the
analytic approach and the change strategies in dealing with sexism and racism issues. Under
motive forces, the management will look at the justification behind adopting a multicultural
setup in the advocacy campaign, particularly why there is a need for different races and sexes in
the campaign. The analytic phase involves focusing on social, cultural and cognitive differences
among the workforce with a view of learning and appreciating different cultural practices, beliefs
and perception to certain aspects. Lastly, a comprehensive diversity change strategy will be
incorporated to minimize bias, achieve organizational justice and develop cultural competence.
The executive committee shall be responsible for designing, developing, implementing and
enforcing the aforesaid strategies. All the strategic activities will be escalated to the regional
coordinators who will, in turn, pass them to their subjects.
Group locality

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Occupational Safety and Health Advocacy
The infectious diseases infection awareness and prevention campaign nationwide
advocacy campaign. This implies that the majority of the workforce will be geographically
dispersed and distributed across all the twelve Australian states. However, for purposes of
coordination and fluency of operations, the head office that hosts the executive committee will
be stationed in one central place that serves as the headquarters.
Group Networking
The proposed group will heavily rely on social media platforms and online forums such
as blogs spots to network with other similar groups. Social media Networking (SMN) is one of
the most popular effective method of online mass communication and team collaboration
platforms. The techniques are rapidly gaining popularity as one of the most flexible tools of
communication. Social media networking involves the use of social media platforms such as
Facebook pages, Whatsapp and Telegram groups to create awareness to potential audiences
about a certain occurrence, product or developing information (Harper & Leicht, 2015). These
are powerful ways of building brand-loyal followers who may be potential clients or target
recipients. Group members are free to post their feedback and ask questions about a product or
service, making the method more interactive, cheap, and easy to create a rapport with one
another.
Group Progress Evaluation
The success or progress of the group will be evaluated against the set performance
indices as per the objectives of the campaign. Grigoriou and Rothaermel (2017) affirm that
performance measurement is essential in determining the overall effectiveness of a given
methodology in solving a problem, ensuring quality control, and acts as a source of meaningful
feedback that can be used for future decision making (Lidonde et al., 2018). The overall goal of

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Occupational Safety and Health Advocacy
the advocacy is to get as many healthcare nurses as possible gain knowledge and support the
need for safe healthcare environment especial for the personnel working in stations with a high
risk of infection by contagious diseases. As such, the key performance indicator, in this case,
would be the number of healthcare nurses subscribing to the group's ideology. Further, Brown
(2007) writes that evaluating the functionality of a team is paramount. To achieve this, the top
level management will conduct periodic surveys among the group members by asking them to
rate the management based on their decision-making procedures, its alignment to mission,
overall goal, and the general consistency in its intentions.
Strategic and Tactical use of Power
Bobo (2010) defines power as the application of leadership while leadership refers to the
art or practice of influencing and motivating a group or groups of people to work towards
achieving a common goal. Acquier et al. (2017) claim that referent power emanates from the
respect and trust accorded to a leader. It is based on imitation, charisma, identification, and
loyalty. Intrinsically, strategic use of power in advocacy is paramount in attaining
aforementioned values. This advocacy shall adopt distributed leadership since the organization
leadership is dispersed across the country. In this approach, the responsibility of making
decisions will be decentralized as much as possible whenever appropriate. The power in the
organization is structured in two main layers namely the core leadership and the local leadership.
While the core authority ensures the effective and coherent running of the organization, the local
team leader ensures the flexibility of the organization and efficient delivery of short term
objectives.

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Occupational Safety and Health Advocacy
References
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