Category: conference

OHS lawyer says to trust your gut

Occupational health and safety (OHS) seminars can be a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes they seem to be a front for promoting a new management program, but every so often, the information offered is perceptive and rewarding. Herbert Smith Freehills partner Steve Bell has been consistently rewarding over many years. No quoting Section 321 of an OHS Act or PowerPoint slide of obscure and semi-important court cases here. His latest seminar appearance covered

  • Due Diligence,
  • Industrial Manslaughter,
  • Psychosocial Risk Assessments
  • OHS Harmonisation.
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Advice for the 23rd World Congress on Safety and Health at Work

I will be attending the 23rd World Congress on Safety and Health at Work in Sydney in November 2023. After a previous attendance at the Singapore conference a few years ago, I have high hopes but also some reservations.

The Congress is a major opportunity to open our minds. We Australians may think we are leading in some areas of occupational health and safety (OHS), but other than nominated speakers, we may need to be silent about our success until after we have listened and learned about the OHS experience of others. Some delegates will have an inflated sense of importance (more than ours), but most have come to learn, and it’s these delegates on whom we should focus.

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Learning of ourselves from others

Adam Goodes will be a featured speaker at the 23rd World Congress of Health and Safety At Work in Sydney, Australia, in November 2023. My initial response was, “What does he know about workplace health and safety?” This question is perhaps more indicative of my limited perspective of occupational health and safety (OHS). I have discussed my question with several people over the last week and have a partial answer to my question, but, as is often the case in OHS, more questions arose.

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Awards Night speeches

The WorkSafe Victoria Awards Night for 2022 contained three main speeches:

Pearson

Pearson’s speech contained a couple of elements that implied it was written by someone without a deep understanding or history of OHS in Victoria. He mentioned “Kaizen” which was a blast from the past, being associated with lots of Lean managements and Six Sigmas. These concepts are rarely heard of in OHS circles now, perhaps because the Kaizen focus in Australia was often on individual workers and efforts rather than systems of work. Pearson said:

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The next stage of OHS analysis?

“One of our key roles as the regulator is to understand why workplace injuries happen” –

Dr Natassia Goode. Worksafe Victoria, February 9, 2023.

Dr Goode made this statement at a research seminar for the Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research. She went on to explain those “widely acknowledged” causes in an expansive discussion about “systems thinking“.

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Research indicates OHS strategies

Last week, the Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) conducted presentations of its latest research programs. Those projects included:

  • Vicarious Trauma
  • Evaluating Pilot Programs
  • Bitumen Fume Exposure
  • Systems Thinking
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Is Safety Leadership for everyone or just the executives?

At last week’s Asia Pacific Occupational Safety and Health Organisation conference, I bumped into Jen Jackson, a young creative thinker on occupational health and safety (OHS) and the author of “How to Speak Human”. We had a quick chat about OHS leadership and gender issues. Below is an edited transcript with a link to the raw audio.

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