research – Page 168 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Is there a Mars safety and a Venus safety?

A research paper released last month in Germany caught my attention even though it does not relate directly to research undertaken in a work environment.

There seems to be an established train of thought that men and women choose to take risks based on some sort of gender criteria.

Alison L. Booth and Patrick J. Nolen have published “Gender Differences in Risk Behaviour: Does Nurture Matter?” They researched risk behaviour along gender lines in secondary education, a different sample choice to other researchers who mostly looked at their university students. Booth and Nolen found

“…gender differences in preferences for risk-taking are sensitive to the gender mix of the experimental group, with girls being more likely to choose risky outcomes when assigned to all-girl groups. This suggests that observed gender differences in behaviour under uncertainty found in previous studies might reflect social learning rather than inherent gender traits.”

Gender studies are fraught with ideological baggage and it is a brave person who chooses this line of study, as I learnt through studying sociology and Russian literature at university (but that’s another story).

The full report is heavy going for those with no sociology background but the research flags an issue that could be useful to pose to the growing band of workplace psychologists and culture gurus – what are the gender-based variations in unsafe behaviours in the workplace?

Could the available research mean different safety management approaches in workplaces with different gender mixes?

When people talk about workplace culture, could there be a male culture and a female culture? (We certainly refer to a macho culture in some industries) In other words, is there a Mars safety and a Venus safety?

Workplace safety tries hard to be generic but has variations based on industry types. Perhaps we should be looking more closely at the demographics of these types and varying our safety management approaches?

Kevin Jones

Safety Interviews

A couple of weeks ago I conducted interviews with several speakers in the Safety In Action Conference to be held in Melbourne, Australia at the end of March 2009. The finalised videos are below.

Helen Marshall is Australia’s Federal Safety Commissioner who has a challenging job monitoring major government construction sites.

Dr Martyn Newman is a a fascinating speaker on the issues of leadership and emotional intelligence and how safety professionals can benefit for applying these concepts to their corporate aims.

Jill McCabe is a recent member of WorkSafe Victoria who provides quite startling survey information on the attitudes of supervisors to workplace safety.

Barry Sherriff is a partner with law firm Freehills and was recently also one of the review panellists into Australia’s OHS law review. Since this video, the final report of the panel has been publicly released and Barry will be discussing harmonisation at the Safety In Action conference.

John Merritt is the Executive Director of WorkSafe and a strong advocate of workplace safety.

Although part of my job is to help promote the Safety In Action conference, I have tried to provide a resource that will not be temporary and is actually useful to safety professionals everywhere.

Tip: Use the high quality YouTube settings if you can. It makes these much easier to view but does not improve the appearance of the interviewer.

Kevin Jones

First Aid and Burns

The correct and established treatment for burns is

“.. to hold the burn under cool running water for at least 20 minutes”.

This reduces the continuing damage generated by burning tissue.

This has been the advice for decades and was recently reemphasised by the Victorian Government. So why are burn creams still on the market?

Perhaps there is a place for burn creams – when 20 minutes’ supply of cool running water is not available.

In December 2008, the Australian Defence Forces used burn cream. According to a media release

The ADF has been advised that four Iraqi civilian vehicles were damaged and two Iraqi men received superficial burns to their hands when they reportedly attempted to remove hot debris from their cars.

The Iraqi men were treated at the scene by Coalition Forces with burn cream.

Child Safety Australia recommends burn cream in a domestic first aid kit for the treatment of blisters.

The Australian Red Cross are emphatic, but allow room to move:

“NEVER use burn cream as an initial treatment. This should only be used a doctor’s recommendation.”

In 2003 (reference not publicly available), the Mayo Clinic in Rochester advised the following first aid treatments for burns

With chemical burns, make sure the chemical and any clothing or jewelry in contact with the chemical are removed.

Cool the burn under running water long enough to reduce the pain, usually 15 to 20 minutes. If this isn’t possible, immerse the burn in cold water or cover with cold compresses. Don’t put ice directly on the burn. Ice can cause frostbite and further damage.

Once the burn is cooled, apply a lotion or moisturizer to soothe the area and prevent dryness. Don’t apply butter. It holds heat in the tissues and may cause more damage.

Cover the burn with a sterile gauze bandage. Wrap loosely. Bandaging keeps air off the burn and reduces the pain.

Take an over-the-counter pain medication unless your doctor has told you to avoid these medications.

Don’t break blisters. If the blister is broken, wash with antibacterial soap and water, apply an antibiotic ointment and bandage.

No mention of burn cream and only an antibiotic cream in relation to blisters.

Safety professionals seek evidence, from which solid and valid decisions can be made. Why then does the initial treatment of burns have such a variety of advice? Can we simply put it down to the commercial desires of cream manufacturers? Or the lack of explanation from the defence forces?

I am old enough to have experienced my mother applying butter to my burns. We have had generational change in this treatment but how much more change would have occurred if workplace first aiders, and parents, had not had burn creams advocated as a legitimate first aid treatment?

Kevin Jones

Draft guidance on musculoskeletal injuries in mining

Any inquiry into musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) in any industry is of great interest to OHS professionals as MSD are the bane of the profession.

The New South Wales Dept of Primary Industries (DPI) is requesting public comment on a new MSD guidance for the mining and extractive industries. Below is some text from the media release

Industry comment is being sought by the Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD) Working Party on the guidance document The Management of Musculoskeletal Disorders in the Mining and Extractives Industry.

The benefits of the guide are that it;
• Facilitates sites taking planned preventative measures;
• Uses the capacities that already exist and;
• Provides effective tools for sites to use.

Comments are welcome on the guidance through the DPI website by close of business 27 March 2009.

Kevin Jones

National OHS Review – initial comments

Several OHS colleagues on an international discussion forum have expressed some opinions on the final report of the Australia’s National Model OHS Law review.

Safety Alerts

One asked that better and more frequent safety alerts be published by the regulators and that those reports be based on fatalities, injuries and near misses.

There is an inconsistency of incident reporting in Australia. For instance, emergency service departments have different ways of notifying the media of incidents. Most rely on regular (multiple times each day) visits to their websites. This option doesn’t work unless one has tracking software or are doing nothing else. Several distribute email bulletins on a daily basis. Most of the bulletins deal with traffic incidents, floods or bushfires, but several also report on emergency incidents to individuals and, although not explicit, many occur in workplaces.

Incident alerts from emergency services are good because it is a service that OHS regulators and enforcers also receive and act upon.

For many years, various Australia safety organisations have published OHS solutions databases or, initially, folders. The maintenance of these have fluctuated over the years in relation to technological change and political interest. It is pointless trying to establish a fixed-point or hard-copy library when the Internet is now the primary resource tool.

It should be added that considerable information can be garnered from court reports of OHS prosecutions however, the Magistrates’ Courts do not provide publicly accessible court reports so any matters heard at that level are rarely reported, except by someone who is sitting in the court. To gain a proper understanding of the OHS legislative process, coverage of all levels of legal action should be encouraged.

Risk Management

Another colleague expressed concern about the use of “risk” throughout the report. Below is a section of the report that explains the review panel’s approach:

“In Chapter 30, we discuss the role of the risk management process in the model Act. As we noted in our first report, risk management is essential to achieving a safe and healthy work environment. We found that risk management is implicit in the definition of reasonably practicable, and as such, need not be expressly required to be applied as part of the qualifier of
the duties of care. Further, as we discuss in this report, risks can be successfully managed without mandating hazard identification and risk assessment in all cases, particularly where the hazards are well known and have universally accepted controls.

Therefore we recommend that the model Act should not include a specific process of hazard identification and risk assessment, or mandate a hierarchy of controls, but that the regulation-making power in the model Act should allow for the process to be established via regulation, with further guidance provided in a code of practice, as is contemporary practice.
The application of risk management process should however be encouraged…” (page xviii)

Throughout the review process the Victorian OHS Act was the most influential piece of legislation and that Act removed the previous requirement to assess workplace risks to determine the most appropriate control measure. WorkSafe Victoria had, for years, advocated in its publications and guidelines to “Find-Assess-Fix”. The “Assess” was dropped in many instances as the suitable control measure had been well-established just not widely applied.

The WorkSafe position was in response to those business operators who may say “I don’t care how hazardous the bloody thing is just fix it!” It was hoped that this would save time and “unnecessary” paperwork, and that other State jurisdictions would take the same approach. None did, and the removal of “Assess” confused businesses and safety professionals as it is a major inconsistency with the Australian Standard on Risk Management.

WorkSafe tried to calm the confusion by saying that they still though assessing risks was a good idea for many new and developing hazards, just that assessment could be done away with as a legislative requirements in most instances.

It seems like the National Review Panel supports the Victorian approach to risk assessment. Not so long ago, the New South Wales government subsidised a lot of training for farmers and others in the agricultural sector on risk assessment. Now it will have to re-explain.

The other concern with the panel’s approach to risk assessment is that it sees risk management as fitting within “reasonably practicable”, a concept that SafetyAtWorkBlog is not convinced helps in managing safety. “Reasonably practicable” is a concept that is defined and refined through prosecutions and court processes, therefore, it can change and it is best interpreted by lawyers. OHS legislation was designed to be readily understood by the layman for where the responsibility for safety sits with the employer and, to a lesser extent, the employee. As soon as law firms are brought into the process, information is locked away under lawyer-client privilege, the cost of safety skyrockets and any safety management lessons are delayed until the court case is heard (or not heard) years later.

It should be remembered that the National OHS Model Law was about the law relating to workplace safety not the implementation of safety management. It is this differentiation that needs to be constantly pushed to the government to avoid workplace safety becoming a management task that cannot be undertaken without a lawyer watching intently over one’s shoulder all the time.

Kevin Jones

Eye injury statistics for workplaces

In early February 2009, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released a statistical report on eye injuries in Australia. There was a small chapter on eye injuries that occurred in workplaces. Seeing as how the readers of SafetyAtWorkBlog love statistical reports, some of the data is presented below.

For further data, and graphs, it is recommended you download the report.

According to the report, Eye-related injuries in Australia,

A total of 8,640 workers compensation claims with eye injury or disease as the primary diagnosis were contained in the NOSI database for the period July 1999 to June 2005.

Median time lost because of eye injury in total decreased from 2.0 weeks in 2000-01 to 1.6 weeks in 2004-05. In 2004-05, injuries described as ‘eye: other and multiple’ resulted in the longest median time loss (2.0 weeks).

Australia’s final report of OHS Model Law Review released

The final report of the review into Model OHS Law in Australia has been released. As usual Deacons law firm is the first to provide an analysis of the major recommendations of the report.

Over the next week there will be a flurry of activity from, particularly, the labour law firms but the rush is unnecessary. The timetable for when change becomes a reality is well over 12 months away and the global financial crisis has thrown political timetables to the winds.

The timetable for Australia’s emissions trading scheme are becoming vague, state elections are perhaps being brought forward, where they can, and, most importantly, the business sector will be protesting long and hard on any regulation that may increase their costs. If ever there was a time for safety professionals and associations to be campaigning on the truth that safety decreases operating costs in the long term, that time is now.

Judge leaders by how they react in a crisis not in the easy times.

Category: research

Is there a Mars safety and a Venus safety?

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Safety Interviews

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First Aid and Burns

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Draft guidance on musculoskeletal injuries in mining

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National OHS Review – initial comments

Safety Alerts

Risk Management

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Eye injury statistics for workplaces

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Australia’s final report of OHS Model Law Review released

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Safety Alerts

Risk Management

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