The Health and Community Services Union (HACSU), as a recipient of WorkSafe grant funding, has worked with members, employers, academics and service delivery providers to create a fit for purpose prevention and early-intervention response to gendered violence and sexual harassment in the health and caring industries.
Work-related gendered violence toward healthcare workers is pervasive. It is often enacted by a range of perpetrators, including by patients, participants, consumers, their relatives or visitors, and it disproportionately affects women and minoritised genders.
Breaking The Silence is a pioneering initiative designed to confront the challenges of gender-based violence and sexual harassment within the disability and mental health sectors. Recognising the unique vulnerabilities faced by these workers, HACSU’s project launched a pilot program with employer partners Monash Health, Orygen/Headspace, Possability and Yooralla.
HACSU members worked with employers to purpose-build face to face and online training for the health caring sector covering safe and supported workplaces, bystander intervention and responding to disclosures with Women's Health Victoria, and vicarious trauma self-paced online training set with Phoenix Australia.
To ensure that the developed training programs are deeply informed by those working on the front lines HACSU have established an expert steering committee for the project comprised of six mental health workers and six disability workers. The Breaking the Silence training program provided specialised training to approximately 1,000 disability workers and 600 mental health workers better equipping those professionals with best-practice responses to gendered violence, improving their ability to create safer workplaces.
HACSU has also developed an on-site peer support program for affected workers, standardised workplace policies and industrial clauses to support employers and advocates with processes and guidance on how to step through prevention and early-intervention of Occupational Violence and Aggression, gendered-violence, and sexual harassment. The standardised policies and industrial clauses call for the introduction of a simpler reporting tool, and robust sexual safety policies for managers and workers, with an easy-to-read version for patients, participants and consumers.
To accompany the Breaking the Silence training program HACSU have also developed a suite of resources –
- Evaluation report – HACSU’s training content and workplace policies undergo academic evaluation by the Australian National University's Global Institute of Women's Leadership and the University of Sydney
- Partner booklet – summary and overview of the Breaking the Silence project for project partners and employers
- Member booklet – project explainers for HACSU members and other workers
- Posters – for doorways, for workers, for gendered violence awareness
- Tips for being an active bystander
- Literature review – a summary of current research into work-related gendered violence in healthcare
We encourage workers from all sectors to review the available resources and consider how they translate to our own workplaces.