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”.
As October is Australia’s Safe Work Month there are several awards evenings. On 19 October 2017, Victoria’s WorkSafe conducted theirs. It was a sedate evening in comparison to previous events. Very few tables whoop-ed their nominations, the MC did not leer at the female waiters and none of the winners danced across the stage. But there were a couple of notable moments.
Richard Wallace
The most obvious was the standing ovation one winner received from the entire audience.
The latest safety management standard ISO45001 will be active in a few months’ time. It is the first international Standard in occupational health and safety (OHS), a fact supported by the length of time and horse-trading that has occurred in its development. It will be an important OHS document for many countries as, for some, it is a first. For Western countries, like Australia, New Zealand and Britain, ISO45001 is the latest in a long line of safety management standards, so the hype is more muted.
The new features of this Standard have been outlined in
Recently David Caple gave his annual address to the Central Safety Group in Melbourne. Caple (pictured above) is a prominent ergonomist, an adjunct professor at the Centre for Ergonomics & Human Factors, La Trobe University, a representative on several government OHS-related committees and has an enviable information network.
Fresh from the Singapore OHS conference, Caple speculated on the future of the workplace safety profession at a time when many are indicating an increasing demand for OHS services and advice. He used a graph of the membership of the Safety Institute of Australia to illustrate part of the challenge.
I travelled to the 21st World Congress on Safety and Health in Singapore as a delegate and a media representative from my home in Australia. Was it worth attending? Yes and no. That may seem a weak answer but I attended in two capacities with two purposes – as an occupational health and safety (OHS) professional and an independent media representative. Both were satisfied a little bit and both could have been better. Here’s a personal report on my professional and media experiences at the World Congress.
The launch of a “Vision Zero” campaign about occupational health and safety (OHS) was a major element of the recent World Congress on Safety and Health at Work but it has created confusion and some alarm.
The Secretary-General of the International Social Security Association (ISSA) Hans-Horst Konkolewsky told SafetyAtWorkBlog that Vision Zero “is not a Zero Harm campaign”. However confusion appeared on the first day of the Congress when an organisation was given a Vision Zero award for a safety program that the organisation has just and repeatedly described as “Zero Harm”.
The best solution to this confusion is to ignore the Vision Zero branding and look at the intentions and resources behind the razzamatazz. If you do, there is a lot of good information.
Following yesterday’s article on the impending international occupational health and safety (OHS) management Standard, ISO45001, some readers have asked for more details. David Solomon, the Head of the Australian International Delegation of ISO45001 provided a table that compares the elements of ISO45001 with AS4801 and OHSAS18001.
According to Solomon there are several elements that are new to ISO45001, ie. not included overtly in AS4801: