The Family Violence Health, Safety and Wellbeing Guide aims to protect, support and promote the health, safety and wellbeing of the sexual assault and specialist family violence sector. It is the sector’s shared vision to create inclusive, equitable and safe workplaces which support workforce wellbeing. Supporting the wellbeing of the sector allows us to sustainably assist victim-survivors and achieve our goal of ending family violence. 

Every organization has a duty under the Victorian Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Act 2004 to have policies and practices to keep the workforce safe. Intended to complement existing health, safety, and wellbeing efforts in workplaces, the evidence-based guide outlines actionable steps and tools through a trauma and violence informed lens. Designed to assist organizations to foster workplace cultures where it is safe and acceptable to talk about struggles and receive support without stigma the Guide is based on the PERMAH model of wellbeing. You can learn more about the PERMAH model here.

The first step recommended in the Guide is to ‘measure health, safety and wellbeing’. To make this easy, reliable and affordable for your workplace Family Safety Victoria has partnered with The PERMAH Wellbeing Survey to provide you with free access to a tool that:

• is completely confidential – everyone’s results are de-identified and held by The Wellbeing Lab.
• takes less than five minutes for people to complete and their personal results are immediately available to them.
• can be used to create organizational, team, and individual, wellbeing plans that include more than 200 evidence-based health and wellbeing practices.
• can generate organizational and team reports, providing a systems approach to caring for wellbeing.

It is recommended that you measure the wellbeing of teams and organizations at least twice a year, approximately every six months (you are welcome to measure more frequently, however, please be mindful of creating survey fatigue).