Victoria awards over $1.7m to tackle occupational disease and illness

Victoria has awarded $1.7 million to six organisations to help to tackle occupational disease and illness — the funding coming through the latest round of WorkSafe Victoria’s grants program to help reduce workplace harm and support injured workers. 

As they often take a long time to show symptoms after exposure, occupational diseases and illnesses can be difficult to deal with; the delay making them harder to detect and manage than other health and safety risks.

Providing up to $300,000 in funding for successful applicants to deliver improved risk management practices, increased education and awareness, or better support for those impacted or at risk of harm, funded projects include:

• The Australian Workers’ Union — raising awareness and improving how occupational diseases such as asbestosis and silicosis are managed in high-risk industries, especially in regional areas and among migrant workers.
• Brickies Network — to run programs educating residential bricklayers about the dangers of crystalline silica exposure.
• GippsDairy — to provide targeted education to dairy workers to reduce Q fever cases in the Gippsland region.
• Master Plumbers — to address health risks and disease prevention in the plumbing industry by looking at how work environments impact long-term health.
• Monash University — aiming to identify key strategies for educating migrant workers about occupational health and safety risks by leading a research project studying Vietnamese stonemasons who developed silicosis.
• The United Workers Union — focusing on better education around disease risks in commercial laundries.
   

“These grants will help each project successfully leverage expert knowledge to implement new resources and innovative practices — each improving the health, safety and wellbeing of workers across a number of industries,” WorkSafe Victoria CEO Ash West said.

Application details for the 2025–26 funding round will be announced on the WorkSafe Victoria website in the coming months. More information is available here, via the WorkSafe Victoria website.

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