Food Flourish: Safer work in hospital food services

A new workplace health and safety program has helped improve hospital staff wellbeing.

Productivity Matters Pty Ltd

Hospital staff prepare thousands of patient meals every day. Their work involves repetitive activities, including:

These repetitive tasks are known as 'hazardous manual handling' risks. They can result in workplace injuries.

More hospital staff are being injured by repetitive tasks. To help manage these risks, Productivity Matters created the Food Flourish program.

Food Flourish was a participative program, informed by the APHIRM toolkit.

First, hospital staff helped identify hazards. Then, practical solutions were trialled. These included new trolleys and a cutlery wrapping machine.

Food Flourish improvements were:

Productivity Matters says Food Flourish helped reduce WorkCover claims and improve job satisfaction.

WorkSafe supported Food Flourish through a manual handling grant.

See how Food Flourish helped hospital workplace health and safety.