April report for Society Culture and Health

7 April 2021

Progress on research projects

Tinh Doan and Liana Leach have been hard at work contributing to the Mental Health Modelling project (in collaboration with colleagues at KPMG and Monash University, and funded by the federal Department of Health). The ANU lead for this project is Peter Butterworth (our colleague in CRAHW) and Lyndall Strazdins is also a part of the ANU team. The project aims to develop an analytical model capable of predicting the current and future impact of COVID-19 on rates of mental illness, mental wellbeing, suicide risk and suicide rates. Primarily, we have been using the MADIP (Multi-Agency Data Integration Project) data in the modelling.

Christine LaBond has recently completed the last of 30 semi-structured interviews with young apprentice construction workers regarding the ways they communicate with their supervisors about workplace safety and mental wellbeing, as part of the iCare Foundation funded project, “Conversations about life, health, and safety: Social supports for young construction workers’ safety and wellbeing”, in partnership with RMIT, Master Builders Association NSW, and the NSW Centre for Work Health and Safety. Christine will soon finish ten interviews with apprentice supervisors, and combined with the apprentice interviews, these will inform an intervention for an RCT with apprentices and supervisors. This is a mixed methods research project, and while interviews have been underway, Tinh Doan and Lyndall Strazdins have been designing a baseline survey and an intervention to improve communication between apprentices and supervisors.