An odd media statement was released by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) on 23 October 2017 regarding the new international occupational health and safety (OHS) management system Standard ISO45001. Several days later Standards Australia released a statement that supported and clarified ACCI’s position
ACCI states that
“….the draft standard is still several months away from being finalised”.
On 24 October 2017, Australia’s Ministers for Employment and Small Business announced a new taskforce led by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that will conduct an investigation into quad bike safety. What is different about this taskforce is that it is
Continue reading “New quad bike safety taskforce has a mid-2018 deadline”
It seems that we are constantly being urged to innovate, to be creative and to think differently. This is equally true in the discipline of occupational health and safety (OHS), but part of thinking differently in the future should also involve reassessing the past.
It is often said that many the OHS performance indicators, predominantly Lost Time Injury (LTI) calculations, have shown a “plateau-ing” of safety performance. From this common position, companies have moved to new OHS training strategies that involve behaviours, values, cultural norms, safety culture and other employee and organisational recalibrations. But what if the case in support of these strategies was not as strong as first thought? What if the “plateau-ing” did not exist or the increase in performance was not as strong as the LTI-based data seemed to indicate?
Academics,
This month the “Future of Leadership” conferences are travelling Australia. The Melbourne stop, on 21 September, started really well with three on-topic speakers but declined strongly after morning tea with at least one speaker who had nothing to say about leadership. At the half-time break, one hopes that the conference gets back on track because when it was, it was very good.
This leadership conference is very different from occupational health and safety (OHS) conference because it talks about a concept in such general terms that the audience can impose whatever context it chooses. As this blog is about workplace safety, predominantly, OHS context was paramount.
If occupational health and safety (OHS) is to include the “whole-of-life” for workers, companies, products and projects, OHS professionals need to expand their pool of knowledge to meet the demands for an inclusive organisational culture. One recent research paper supports this approach by looking at the return to work of cancer survivors.
In front of thousands of delegates and dignitaries, the 21st World Congress on Safety and Health was officially opened yesterday by the Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
There are three themes of this conference:
Coincidentally, as an article about quad bike safety was being uploaded to this blog, details of the release of Tasmanian coronial findings were received. The findings were released by Coroner Simon Cooper on August 25 2017 and were not reported widely.
The Coroner investigated seven deaths related to quad bikes but only two occurred on workplaces or as part of performing work – Heather Richardson and Roger Larner. Curiously, WorkSafe Tasmania did not investigate these work-related deaths. Continue reading “Tassie Coroner releases his safety findings on 7 quad bike deaths”