Central Safety Group Melbourne

Fatigue management in a high-risk environment

We had a wonderful final presentation for 2025, given by Jane Skillen, OHS Adviser for Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM) and a CSG member. 

Jane commenced her presentation with a brief introduction of VIFM’s 24/7 services to both deceased and living persons.  VIFM also oversees the Donor Tissue Bank and contributes to international and domestic research programs.

Her informative fatigue management case study was based on the state-wide clinical forensic medicine team, who respond to physical assault examinations, fitness for interview assessments and traffic blood testing. Within this team the Forensic Nurse Examiners (FNE) are a 100% casual workforce, most with secondary nursing employment. Eighty percent are female, with the majority aged between 40-60 years.

While WorkSafe has a very specific definition of work-related fatigue, VIFM now applies a wider multi-dimensional definition to include mental, physical and emotional fatigue. This was done after exploring the factors contributing to fatigue at work using a robust strategic risk-based approach, in consultation with the FNEs.  Jane’s presentation delves deeply into this risk assessment and the control measures introduced to manage the risks associated with fatigue impairment in FNEs.

Feedback from the presentation:

“Sensational piece of work Jane!”

“Valuable presentation and thank you very much for sharing. Your colleagues do some amazing work under such extraordinary circumstances. Great learnings for us.”

I wholeheartedly agree with that feedback; I really liked the education material and focus on self-care.

Financial members can gain further advcie on fatigue management from David Caple's presentation in 2016, Managing fatigue: getting it right, in the Speakers archive (log in first).

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Rebuilding safety culture – a case study

There was keen interest from the large turnout at Mary Kikas’ lunchtime talk on 11 February where she presented a case study on rebuilding safety culture. 

Mary described the process and steps she implemented to address workplace risk in the context of hazardous manual handling and fatigue management. She found an important key to success was being hands-on and practical, as well as consulting with the workforce. This helped restore a positive workplace culture in an organisation where employee job satisfaction and trust had fallen after significant change following a series of redundancies.   

A highlight of the presentation was how open she was about the obstacles and setbacks, as well as the approaches she took to dealing with these.  The message was there’s no quick and easy way to build safety culture, as it needs to be multifaceted and contextually relevant to the organisation, but hard work where you involve all levels of the company can get results.

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