Knowledge guides

LG17: Occupational health and safety, and legislation

Legal organisational and regulatory issues

Trainees will have in-depth knowledge of the topics listed under each legal, organisation and regulatory issue heading.

For the legal concepts listed, Trainees should be able to describe and identify the broad legal concepts as they apply to occupational and environmental medicine and the knowledge required to apply the information correctly.

View

Important specific issues

Trainees will identify important specialty-specific issues and the impact of these on diagnosis, management, and outcomes.

View

Courts

  • Effective contributions to the legal process
  • Medical:
    • panels
    • referees
    • reports
  • Purpose of courts
  • Rules, including the constraints on expert evidence

Industrial agreements

  • Local industrial relations mechanisms

Laws related to workplace and environmental hazards

  • Legal administering authorities
  • Non-legislated guides and standards
  • Relevant codes, guides, and standards, including sections of a statute that are:
    • pivotal
    • seldom applied
  • Types and tiers of law

Medical reports

  • Broad content of workplace and environmental compensation laws
  • Equipment required for medical report preparation
  • Legal and insurance requirements
  • Legal purpose of medical reports
  • Published guidelines for report preparation

Common law

  • Influence of common law on occupational and environmental medicine

Industrial

  • Local industrial relations mechanisms and their documented effects on health and safety
  • Nature of employer responses
  • Physiological basis of industrial agreements, such as on fatigue or shift work, from overlays generated by industrial negotiation
  • Vigour of activism by local employee representatives and advocates

Medical reporting

  • Completion of medical certificates / documentation for governmental and non-governmental organisations
  • General purposes for which compensation is provided by both common and statute law, such as:
    • incapacity payments, which may be time-limited
    • lump sums for impairment
    • payment of medical expenses
  • Workers’/patients’ understanding of ethical and legal impacts of medical reporting