Almost every occupational health and safety (OHS) inquiry by the Australian Government has acknowledged the inadequacies of data on workplace injuries, illnesses and deaths. The 1995 Inquiry into Occupational Health and Safety (Volume 2) (pages 377-378) by the (then) Industry Commission acknowledged the lack of empirical evidence and made up its own. The situation has barely improved.
However a new project by West Australian academic,
Recently I recorded my contribution to an online conference called the RTW Summit. This conference is first to Australia although other organisations have proposed such a format previously but never eventuated.
The conference has been devised and organised by Mark Stipic, a young Return To Work professional who started a podcast recently. He is intelligent and one of those people who is not afraid to take risks in the emerging world of social media.
Continue reading “Free online safety conference – RTW Summit”
Kirstin Ferguson has been an amazing advocate for occupational health and safety (OHS), good governance, Board responsibility, and gender diversity. She is receiving a great deal of media attention lately for her Celebrating Women campaign on social media. Ferguson has inspired, and been inspired by, many people in the OHS profession in Australia and is an example of how OHS blends with issues of leadership and governance in a way that is very different from the Trojan Horse analogy recently discussed by John Green.
On March 8 2017 Australia’s
There were three books that I left off my Christmas/Summer reading list. Each of them important for my occupational health and safety (OHS) professional development and personal curiosity.
The first is Rethink – The Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole. This books looks at what we think are new ideas and sees the precursors or the ideas’ previous appearances. I was attracted to this perspective because I am seeing a lot of new ideas in OHS that are familiar and similar to what has come before. Continue reading “More books on the Christmas list”
The media is full of lists of Christmas reading, usually in order to sell books. Below is a selection of the safety-related books that are in my Summer reading pile. (No, I am not going to list the Batman comics or Star Trek books. That would be embarrassing.)
I first met Robert Sams at a book launch of one of the Rob Long’s books. Sams’ approach to risk has some similarity to Long’s, which is acknowledged in the Forewards, but those who develop or apply a theory are often more interesting than those who created the theory. The the format of the book is a “reflective journal” also makes this nook more intriguing. It is part diary, part blog, part journal but above all it is a journey of learning with the occasional epiphany. Continue reading “SafetyAtWorkBlog’s Christmas reading list”
October is National Safety Month in Australia and episode 5 of the Cabbage Salad and Safety podcast discusses a range of topics to mirror the diversity of National Safety Month.
Siobhan Flores-Walsh and myself talk about:
The Gender in Safety conversation is one that I intend to expand upon in the coming weeks and is useful to notion relation to the increasing number of “women in safety”- type events.
This podcast is a mixed bag but I am interested in hearing your thought on the podcast and the topics it contains so post a comment here or email me.
A recent safety convention in Australia had as its theme “Disruption”, a fashionable term that can mean many things to many people. Perhaps why it is a marketer’s dream word. The initial session of the convention was unnerving because speakers were saying that the current jobs and activities of safety professionals will be undertaken by artificial intelligence in a decade. This change is not a coordinated strategy but bits and pieces of this change/threat keep appearing, the latest was in The Guardian on 25 September 2016 in an article called “You’d better listen up“.
That article, ostensibly about headphones included this workplace application:
“Bragi has recently announced a partnership with IBM where it hopes to deliver the massive processing power and cognitive capacity of the Watson AI system via its devices. At the moment, it is exploring how these capabilities could be employed in the workplace. For example, maintenance workers could describe an issue, Watson recognises the problem and talks them through the solution – without their having to refer to manuals or computers, keeping their hands free for the repair. Similarly, doctors could get help with recognising rare conditions and their conversation with a patient would be recorded and saved to the cloud for their records.”
The safety benefits of this contraption is obvious – a manual on call and responsive to vocalised questions. As anyone with a Glaswegian accent trying to set up voicemail in Australia will know, vocal recognition still has a long way to go unless the world is able to be un-Babelled and speak with one accent. (Please not Australian, as artificial intelligences (AI) would struggle with the constant answering of “Yeah – Nah”) Voice recognition software has needed long hours of training to be functioning at a basic level.
Thankfully that tech challenge can be left to the technologists. What is more important, and could provide safety professionals with a future, is the back-end of the application of Watson. Any AI needs knowledge so that the advice it provides to the user/listener/engager is accurate and relevant to the situation, literally, at hand. AIs will not create their own knowledge, at least in the short term, and so will rely on safety professionals and others to provide the knowledge to the software.
Safety professionals are unlikely to provide knowledge of a specific process but will likely be called on to add value to the mechanical work activity or discussion. Occupational health and safety (OHS) is likely to be one of the assessment criteria used by the AI. For instance, in the response to the work activity quoted above the maintenance worker will want to know how to do something. The OHS contribution to the AI’s response would be to ensure that the task is undertaken safely, in a safe environment or with the suitable protective equipment or the correct tool.
The convention was shown video of an AI that verified that workers were dressed appropriately for the work conditions before allowing access to site. This would replace those OHS consultants who like to be safety police but the situation described in the video was understandable. There are rules for specific PPE prior to entering a workplace with hazards that could be reduced by wearing the PPE. No PPE, no site access. The argument in favour of AI applications would be that the safety professional could attend to more important activities. The sad reality is that some safety professionals rely on this type of activity to give their jobs worth.
The reality of AI in OHS cannot be avoided. Those who advocate for disruption argue that disruption provides opportunities for the creative, the agile and the clear thinkers but it is also the case that many safety professionals will be left behind like Neanderthals to Hom (OHS) Sapiens.