Australian worksites have established a system of red, green or blue cards that are used to indicate a level of OHS competence on a range of worksites. This type of system is reflected around the world in different industries and different forms, such as Safety Passports, or the green card in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Some professional safety organisations in Australia have banded together, with the support of at least one OHS regulator, to establish a competency benchmark for safety professionals under the banner, Health and Safety Professionals Alliance (HaSPA). As people and organisations digest what is involved with HaSPA, some in the OHS industry believe the initiative is beginning to wobble.
Perhaps the HaSPA members need to promote the initiative in a more readily understandable concept – one that people can accept now and worry about the details later.
SafetyAtWorkBlog proposes the HaSPA Green Card. The operation of the card follows all the protocols of the other competency cards but in relation to the safety professional.
The concept may not work but it seems that the industrial safety industry has already laid decades of groundwork in competency identification and maintenance so why can’t safety professionals follow this and not impose an additional level of complexity to workplace safety?