Category: accountability

Don’t be a fish; be a frog.

“Don’t be a fish; be a frog. Swim in the water and jump when you hit ground.”

Kim Young-ha

This aphorism seems apt for the safety culture journey that is occurring at Melbourne Water under the tutelage of Professor Patrick Hudson (pictured right). Melbourne Water is attempting to become a “generative organisation” in line with Hudson’s Safety Culture Maturity model and hosted a public event with Hudson in early November 2019. This provided an opportunity to hear how the model has evolved, particularly in its applications.

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Political Science (finally) comes to OHS

Improvement in occupational health and safety (OHS) standards has always been the intention of OHS laws. Parallel to this is the intention of the OHS, and allied, professions to continuously improve health and safety through the prevention of harm. However, political leadership on OHS has been scarce over the last few years, especially in the national governments of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. So, it is necessary to look beyond the party politics to other sources of change.

Professor Maureen Dollard speaking at the 2019 ANZSOM Scientific Meeting in Adelaide

At the recent scientific meeting of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Occupational Medicine in Adelaide, prominent academic, Professor Maureen Dollard, introduced a much- needed element of political science into her presentation which was titled “Work Organisation and Psychosocial Factors”. SafetyAtWorkBlog was able to ask Dollard, and fellow presenter Professor Sally Ferguson, about this political context.

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Annual Reports are not as transparent on OHS performance as they could be

Around four or five years ago, occupational health and safety (OHS) reporting in Corporate Annual Reports was a hot topic as Australian research had indicated that Annual Reports were not revealing sufficient, or useful, OHS data. Also awards were being presented for the best OHS reporting in Annual Reports. SafetyAtWorkBlog has looked at a sample of the reports released by the Victorian Government over the last fortnight to see what OHS information is available.

Two major keywords were used to search the Annual Reports – “Safe” and “Well”. These words form the stemS of other search terms such as “safety” and “wellbeing” or “wellness”. Each of the word responses were looked at for a focus on workplace or work-related activity. Although public safety may have an increasing OHS context, public safety, and a range of other “safeties”, were not included.

Some Annual Reports were okay, others? Egh! But what is clear is that there is no excuse.

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“We need to act together to help me get my act together”

On October 21 2019, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews posted on Facebook in support of his government’s move to introduce Industrial Manslaughter (IM) laws. He chose the death of Jacob Kermeen and its effect on the family in support of the need for these laws.

It is surely a coincidence that a fatality from a trench collapse was chosen for this exercise. Some of the leading advocates for IM laws are the relatives of two workers who died from a trench collapse in Ballarat in March 2018, a case being prosecuted by WorkSafe Victoria.

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Truths? Maybe. But Hard? Nah.

Professions often learn more from those in other professions that they do from their own. As such SafetyAtWorkBlog looks in lots of places for insights that may help the occupational health and safety (OHS) profession.

Recently the Australian Human Resource Institute published a discussion paper called “5 Hard Truths about Workplace Culture”. OHS operates in the same workplace culture so there may be lessons for all.

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Important discussion of moral harm, moral repair and what can be done

Occupational health and safety (OHS) needs to talk more about failure, in a similar way that other business processes are dissected and reported. But the challenge to this, and I think the main reasons failure is not discussed, is that OHS failures result in serious injuries, life-altering conditions and deaths. OHS shares something with the medical profession which “buries its mistakes”. There appears to be something shameful in talking about these failures in public, although the OHS profession is full of chatty anecdotes in private.

One of the ways for OHS to discuss these uncomfortable experiences is to focus on Harm rather than legalities and the chase for compliance.

The first paragraph in Derek Brookes‘ new book, “Beyond Harm“, seems to speak to the OHS profession:

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Red Tape comeback

The need to reduce Red Tape is getting another run in Australia through the lobbying of the Business Council 0f Australia and its CEO, Jennifer Westacott. “Red Tape” can be defined in many ways but it is often synonymous with government interference, of which occupational health and safety (OHS) regulation and enforcement is considered part.

In an interview with Laura Tchilinguirian on ABC News Radio on 16 September 2019 Westacott said that the community, which sounds mostly like business people:

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