Professor Niki Ellis hits out at the state of OHS in Australia

“…OHS is not fit for the 21st century. It is isolated, has a limited academic base and remit, uneven provision, lack of good quality data, a poor image and is perceived by many as the servant of the employer.”

Professor Niki Ellis speaks frankly about the OHS discipline in Australia.

Professor Niki Ellis recently was appointed the CEO of the Institute of Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) after some time in the United Kingdom and a short period as the acting chair of the Safety Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission. Prof Ellis provided a refreshing and confronting presentation to the 2009 Comcare Conference (pictured right) that SafetyAtWorkBlog attended. Continue reading “Professor Niki Ellis hits out at the state of OHS in Australia”

Phenomenology and the safety professional

In Australia, safety management is being progressed most obviously through sociology and the work of Andrew Hopkins. But perhaps it is possible to cut through some of the commercial “safety culture” twaddle by looking at the work of philosophers and the concept of phenomenology. As any modern student seems to do instead of reading the original, look to the movie.

On 20 April 2010, Australian lawyer, Andrew Douglas, channeled The Matrix in trying to challenge the thinking of the audience of OHS professionals at the Safety In Action conference.

In his conference paper, Douglas compared the positive and negative safety cultures to the blue and red pill choice that Morpheus offers Neo. Continue reading “Phenomenology and the safety professional”

How many safety awards are too many?

On 23 March 2010, SafetyAtWorkBlog questioned the need for so many government-sanctioned OHS awards and noted that there is little overlap between wellness awards and safety awards.

On 26 March 2010, Australia’s Safety Rehabilitiation and Compensation Commission (SRCC) announced a new category in its OHS awards that will

“recognise organisations that promote health and wellbeing in the workplace–long before employees are affected by injury.”

The SRCC is the organisation that looks after the OHS of

“the federal public service, the Australian Defence Force and national companies in the Comcare scheme.”

With the addition of this new category, the SRCC finally has awards that represent the continuum of worker health and safety from prevention to incident to rehabilitation or compensation. Continue reading “How many safety awards are too many?”

Social networking and OHS

Less than two days ago, someone established a Facebook page in order to seek justice for Brodie Panlock. At the time of writing the page has over 2,800 supporters, mostly young. The page is being moderated very closely so that any inflammatory comments are jumped on very quickly. The site has a maturity that is showing the best elements of social networking sites.

The moderators are referring to the site as a petition but this is not the traditional petition where reams of paper are presented to a politician on the steps of Parliament, although it may come to that. What the Facebook page is showing is the modern (perhaps young) take on generating support for a cause through the technologies with which the supporters are most familiar. Continue reading “Social networking and OHS”

Getting safety promotion right

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) has come in for a lot of “stick” over the last few years by seemingly over-reacting to OHS hazards. In many cases, these reports have come from a misinterpretation of OHS rules and guidelines or a misunderstanding of the basic principles of safety. In some cases it is simply a beat-up my England’s tabloid media.

However, this attitude to safety and the creation of a misperception of OHS has annoyed the HSE. Below is a video that the HSE produced, going by the tone of the video, in response to the bad press.

The “Right People” campaign seems familiar to many other campaigns attempted around the world and the introduction depicting silly headlines shows that the HSE is think-skinned.

Much more successful is the HSE’s recent campaign about safety in farming. Continue reading “Getting safety promotion right”

Fixing what is broken

WorkCover in South Australia has released a discussion paper for public comment on 9 November 2009. The paper is called “Consultation on a new framework for employer incentives” and poses the following questions:

Do you think there should be any financial incentives for employers in relation to workers rehabilitation and compensation?
What do you think about the proposed design principles?
Do you have any specific ideas for employer incentives that encourage return to work?

This discussion paper is part of the review process by the WorkCover Corporation and should be supported. Public comments close on 18 December 2009.

The paper itself has some points of considerable interest. The existing incentive scheme is called a Bonus/Penalty Scheme which has existed for almost 20 years. PricewaterhouseCoopers undertook a review and below are the findings, according to WorkCover:

“WorkCover has been working with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the Bonus/Penalty Scheme in South Australia. Only very weak links were found between the Bonus/Penalty rate and claim outcomes. No evidence was found to suggest that the Bonus/Penalty Scheme has delivered better health and safety outcomes for workers in South Australia.”

That last sentence seems to be a phenomenally honest statement about a scheme that has existed since 1990, been so persistent and continues to be so popular with employers. Such forthrightness from a government authority about one of its own programs is rare.

At some point in the past there may have been some logic in the scheme as similar elements existed under the WorkCare scheme in Victoria many years ago. But since the preventative arm, Safe Work SA, split from WorkCover around 2005, the incentive scheme has not sat comfortably with the government’s RTW focus.

The discussion paper goes on to state:

“WorkCover has not seen much evidence that the Bonus/Penalty Scheme has either reduced injury rates or made workplaces safer. If anything it appears to have had some adverse side-effects, such as encouraging stakeholders to focus excessively on claim costs, the claim costs ‘window’ and coding, instead of return to work.”

Regardless of pointing out the difference between “no evidence” and “much evidence”, WorkCover’s comments illustrate a reality that OHS and RTW professionals have been wrestling with for years, companies have been encouraged to focus on financial cost of Return-To-Work rather than on the injured worker.

As part of WorkCover’s analysis of the existing incentive scheme, it undertook a literature review on experience ratings systems and found the following

“There were some noteworthy findings about experience rating systems, for example:

there is no clear consensus that they have reduced injury rates or made workplaces safer;

they have created perverse motivations, for example to suppress claims, dispute the coding of claims, or only focus on reducing claims within the ‘experience window’;

they may reduce claim numbers but not average claim costs, and average claim severity tends to increase – this is further evidence that the reporting of small claims is sometimes ‘suppressed’; and

there is no obvious link between experience rating bonuses/penalties and an employer’s commitment to safety and return to work.”

The Productivity Commission in 2004 (as discussed in Alan Clayton’s workers compensation review for the Tasmanian Government) recommended experience ratings for large employers as a contributor to the full funding of workers compensation schemes. ( p.44) It is strongly suggested that those wanting to comment on this South Australian WorkCover paper should closely look at the recent changes to workers’ compensation made by the Tasmanian Government.

But it is not all gloom and doom as WorkCover SA has set the parameters for the next scheme. In the discussion paper, they list 11 proposed design principles for consideration:

Focus on return to work

Be affordable and sustainable

Have a direct and substantial effect

Target the right employers

Tailor to specific employer groups

Loss matters

Be simple to explain and run

Use a mix of solutions

Capitalise on the tools and resources we already have

Be transparent

Use an evidence-based approach

In anticipation of the Federal Government’s plans to harmonise workers compensation once OHS is out of the way, such discussion papers, reviews and, more importantly, the public submissions, may provide some clues to how Australia workers compensation and RTW programs may look in ten years time.

Kevin Jones

Summer heat, fatigue and UV – a speculative solution

Let’s pull together several workplace hazards and suggest one control measure that may address all of them at once. Of course, the control may generate other work hazards or management challenges.

In Summer, work occurs throughout daylight hours. The long days, and possibly daylight savings, maximise the window of productivity for workers, particularly those who work outside – building construction, housing, rail maintenance, roadworks….. Such work can lead to the workplace hazards of excessive exposure to ultraviolet radiation (UV), fatigue, and heat stress.

Each of these hazards has its own separate advocates for safe practices, as well as the OHS regulator that provides guidance on all hazards. This complicates the management of OHS because sometimes there are conflicting control measures or at least measures that are incompatible with the needs and desires of the workforce. If we think of this combination of hazards as a Gordian Knot, we could solve the problem by splitting the working day into two sessions on either side of a sleep break or, as the November 2009 edition of the Harvard Health Letter calls it, a nap.

The Harvard article, “Napping may not be such a no-no”, discusses the good and bad of napping and the tone of the article seems to look at this control measure mainly for office-based or administrative tasks.

“[Robert Stickgold, a Harvard sleep researcher] says his and others’ findings argue for employer policies that actively encourage napping, especially in today’s knowledge-based economy. Some companies have set up nap rooms, and Google has “nap pods” that block out light and sound.”

The article suggest a couple of suggestions

“Keep it short. A 20- to 30-minute nap may be ideal. Even just napping for a few minutes has benefits. Longer naps can lead to grogginess.

Find a dark, quiet, cool place. Reducing light and noise helps most people get to sleep faster. Cool temperatures are helpful, too.

Plan on it. Waiting till sleepiness gets so bad that you have to take a nap can be dangerous if you’re driving. A regular nap time may also help you get to sleep faster and wake up quicker.

Don’t feel guilty! A nap can make you more productive at work and at home.”

But sometimes SafetyAtWorkBlog likes to extend a solution to the bigger picture.

In Australia, the peak period for extreme levels of UV is between the daylight savings hours of 10.00am and 1.00pm, or 3.00pm in some instances. If an outside work site suspended work for three hours, the employees could have lunch and rest, or sleep, in the shade. Depending on the location of the work site, some could even go home for that period.

The work day could still be as productive by starting early and finishing late, basically inserting a rest break of several hours into the middle of the daytime shift. There is evidence in the Harvard article that productivity could be increased as a result of the rest break.

iStock_000004187454 construction siestal

On quick reflection, this scenario is a fantasy because the ramifications of such a change are huge, and OHS is unlikely to achieve any structural cultural change of this magnitude, but it remains an attractive fantasy. The attraction is the logical simplicity but, of course, logic is often bashed around by reality and below are some of those realities:

Expanded work hours for a construction adjacent to a residential area working on the 9 to 5
Deliveries of supplies to be rescheduled to the two work periods
Would the split shift continue on cloudy and cool days or during Winter?
Would the portable/temporary lunch sheds now need to include a bunk room for all employees on a work site?
In a bunk room, would one person’s snoring becoming an occupational hazard for everyone?
Can plant be “paused” for the lunch break?
Can a concrete pour be interrupted for a lunch?

Lists of other problems or challenges are welcome through the blog’s comments field below.

Such a structural or societal control option (or fantasy) should be discussed, debated or workshopped as what may not work in the grand scheme may allow for changes, or tweaks, on a smaller scale. Often the best OHS solutions come from speculation which can lead to the epiphany of “why do we do it that way?”

Of course, some countries are way ahead of the rest of the world in managing these workplace hazards by already having a culture that embraces the “siesta“.

Kevin Jones

ng may not be such a no-no

Category: innovation

Professor Niki Ellis hits out at the state of OHS in Australia

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Phenomenology and the safety professional

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How many safety awards are too many?

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Social networking and OHS

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Getting safety promotion right

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Fixing what is broken

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Summer heat, fatigue and UV – a speculative solution

ng may not be such a no-no

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