Category: training

New Bachelor degree in OHS

A new Bachelor degree in OHS is being offered at the University of Queensland.  Professor of Occupational Health and Safety Mike Capra says in a media release that

“graduates would become a new generation of highly-trained OHS specialists who would be in demand due to a workforce shortage.”

The New South Wales WorkCover has had to remind employers not to cut corners on safety due to the tough economic climate.  With the unemployment rate increasing in Australia, the demand claimed by Professor Capra is disputable.

The issue of employability was raised in a discussion forum recently.  One person pointed out that employers are able to be more selective.  When they have to choose between a graduate fresh from university or an applicant with experience, experience will win every time.

It will be interesting to see what programs the Bachelor Degree has in place to provide the necessary practical experience.

Hopefully on graduation in 2015, the career opportunities have improved with a stronger economy.

Professor Capra is quoted further.

“The program was developed at the request of the OHS industry, including peak body the Safety Institute of Australia, which saw the need for a professional qualification in the field,” Professor Capra said.  “The lack of well-qualified OHS professionals is causing alarm among members of major OHS associations, government authorities and employers.”

The biggest motivation for improved professionalism has come from WorkSafe Victoria through the Health and Safety Professionals Alliance, and only within the last couple of years.  It is is the “alarm” of the OHS regulator that seems to have been the biggest factor.  At least WorkSafe  is willing to fund the development of such a program having provided a grant of almost $A400,000 recently.

Some of the claims in the promotional video for the course are dubious (“never be out of a job”, for example) and the video could pass, in parts, for a tourism ad, but if the target audience is school leavers, the focus on fun, sun and job variety is probably relevant.

If it is the first course of its kind in Australia, as claimed, it will be very interesting to watch how it is received.

Kevin Jones

Professionalism and academia

The Australia safety industry is being pushed by OHS regulators to improve its professionalism.  Upgrading of qualifications in any discipline always generates conflict between the educated and the competent.  OHS is no different.

In The Age newspaper on 20 July 2009 was an interesting article that provides a brief overview of postgraduate studies.  The article makes no mention of workplace safety courses but provides an interesting illustration of the dichotomy above.

The full article deserves reading as it illustrates cost and time issues but there were several points made that seem pertinent to recent moves in the OHS profession.

The president of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations, Nigel Palmer, is quoted as saying

“It’s clear that we’ve seen a dramatic increase in fees. Whether or not there has been a corresponding increase in the quality of those courses remains an open question”.

Most postgraduates undertake their studies while employed.  This makes it much easier to manage time, if the company provides study leave options, and it provides a ready source of material for business studies, in particular.  Some companies also assist with the payment of fees.  This is not the case for those who are seeking employment or who are self-employed.  The costs in money and time almost makes postgraduate study an impossibility.

The postgraduate courses themselves are often hard to define.  Professor Richard James of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education admits that most institutions would have difficulty defining a master’s degree.

Holly Alexander chose to study outside the universities after completing a Bachelor of Arts degree.  She found the practicality of her course immensely useful and the article identifies a crucial differentiation between academics and practitioners.

“Of critical importance to her was the fact her teachers practised their craft and provided invaluable industry contacts.”

The OHS profession in Australia is developing a “core body of knowledge” which seems to be vital to the profession but noone has explained why, even though hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on the task.  And still there remains those experienced OHS professionals and practitioners who wonder why after twenty years of successful consulting and advice they need to benchmark themselves to “prove” their professionalism.

Outside the core body of knowledge, Holly Alexander’s point above is very important.  The academics and educators in any profession need to have an industry network that functions in the real world and their professional skills must be able to be applied practically, otherwise the qualification is meaningless.

Kevin Jones

Occupational violence in fast food restaurants and petrol stations

The Australian media has been abuzz over the last couple of days on several issues concerning violence.  Attention increases whenever there is video involved and the latest film of a bashing in Melbourne in a Hungry Jack’s store in the early hours of 13 July 2009 is getting a considerable run.

Most commentators are taking the bashing of 19-year-old Luke Adams as an example of “street violence”.  SafetyAtWorkBlog believes that the fact that this event occurred between customers in a workplace, raises questions about the obligations of retail store owners towards health and safety.

The case of Luke Adams again illustrates the reality that surveillance cameras can assist in the apprehension of criminals but does little to reduce the harm to employees and customers.  This seems to be contrary to the OHS principles in Australian OHS legislation.

SafetyAtWorkBlog would ask any retailers who choose to operate, particularly, during nighttime

  • Are the stores designed to reduce (hopefully eliminate) the risk of violent contact between customers and staff?
  • Are there restrictions on the age or gender of staff who work nightshift?
  • Is the first aid training provided to staff designed to accommodate the emergency treatment of severely injured customers?
  • Has the presence of a security guard been tried during nightshifts?
  • Would the company consider closing a store if the risks to staff and customers became unacceptable?

SafetyAtWorkBlog knows of at least one fast food restaurant in Melbourne that removed its public toilets because of the number of drug overdoses that occurred in the cubicles.  This store eventually closed its 24-hour store, partly, because of the unacceptable risk that developed.

The unfortunate linking of fast food restaurants with violent attacks is an issue of all-night trading as much as any other reason.  It was just over two weeks ago that a fight in the grounds of a Hungry Jacks restaurant in suburban Melbourne was reported and wrapped into the current topic of supposedly racist-based attacks against Indian students.

The attacks are not limited to Melbourne though.  A 19-year-old Korean student, Lee Joon–yub, was killed in Sydney in 2008 after being stabbed at a fast-food restaurant

AIC Service Station Violence coverThe risk of occupational violence, as it is more traditionally understood, is increasing according to findings released on 16 July 2009 by the Australian Institute of Criminology.  Its report, which also received some media attention from radio, finds that

“The incidence of service station armed robbery has steadily increased over the past decade. ….. This opportunistic targeting of service stations has been attributed to their extended opening hours, their sale of cigarettes and other exchangeable goods, their high volume of cash transactions and their isolation from other businesses. Widespread adoption of crime prevention measures by service stations, such as transfer trays, could help reduce their risk of being robbed…..”

The full report is worth reading closely from an OHS perspective as it identifies the characteristics of services stations (and maybe other all-night retail outlets) that are attractive to the opportunistic robber.  We should not dismiss armed robberies as only involving monetary loss to retailers as the study showed that “one-third of armed robbery victims…were individual”.

The AIC report also states that

“…minimal staffing on night shift is seen to increase the risk of armed robbery victimization for service stations.”

This brings in all the OHS advice and research concerning working alone or in isolation.  However there must be some sympathy for employers trying to recruit night shift workers for industries where violence is an increasing risk.

The mention of the hazard control measure of transfer trays is gratifying as it fits with a higher order of control measure in OHS parlance by providing an engineering control.  However this needs to be backed up by specific training for employees on what to do when required to render assistance outside the enclosed booth.

The application of transfer trays may be valid for fast food stores at nighttime by only offering a drive-thru service and further reducing the risk of customer violence against employees.

Pages from VWAHotspots_retail_10_10Regardless of the physical harm from work tasks arising from working in retail, WorkSafe Victoria advises of four control measures for what it describes as the psychological system of stress, bullying and harassment:

  • Your workplace culture and management should encourage open and effective communication.
  • Develop, implement and enforce clear policies and procedures that address bullying, occupational violence, harassment and work pressure in consultation with workers (including young workers) and management.
  • Where money is handled, put in place security measures to reduce the risk of occupational violence.
  • Training and procedures should include all staff at risk, including any casual or on hire workers.

Kevin Jones

Resilience, stress and safety management

The July 25 2007 SafetyAtWork podcast is now available for download.  It includes an interview with Michael Licenblat where we discuss the psychological approach to individuals taking control of their own safety, the benefits of wellbeing programs and the changing workplace.

On listening back to the podcast today, I was struck by several issues he raises:

  • Michael is one of the few wellbeing gurus who directly link the management of stress to the productivity of the worker.  He displays more awareness than many others of the “proactive” OHS context of this approach to human capital.
  • He discusses why it is difficult for all of us to say no to some work tasks, even if  the task is high risk and may injure ourselves and others.
  • He states two core elements of workplace cultures that seem to revolve around the established OHS obligation of consultation.  Perhaps OHS managers can become real agents of change by cranking up consultation.

Kevin Jones

OHS writing is awful too often

We’ve all done it: slipped into auto-mode when putting together OH&S documentation for a punter.  Cut and paste, slam together a whole bunch of references, lots of assumptions that the reader will “get it’”. 

Cutting to the chase- April 2009 revision #2_Page_1And we’ve all probably seen one of those sets of OH&S documents for a safety management system that impresses only by its thickness.  Packed with stock phrases that make us OH&S lot feel all comfy, but leave the punter scratching their head over what the hell we are on about and what it is they are actually expected to do.

I plead guilty to having done that occasionally.  But it grates on me when I re-read something I’ve done from the past that has all those lazy characteristics that bad OH&S writing can drop into; particularly grating since I’ve becoming increasingly dismayed at the frustration punters have with OH&S and how it seems so impenetrable.

A few years ago I put together a guide on writing OH&S stuff (mostly focussing on guidance material).  I’ve altered it a bit to fit all sorts of OH&S writing but it is available for download (and free) by clicking on the image on this post.

Feel free to use it.  If you’re going to quote bits from it in your own stuff I just ask that I be acknowledged as the author.

Col Finnie
col@finiohs.com
www.finiohs.com

Sitting (not so) pretty

New Australian research shows hours of sedentary activity, like typing emails or sitting at a quality control station, are associated with higher cardio-metabolic health risks that are independent of time spent in moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity.

DrGenevieveHealyAccording to a media statement from University of Queensland and Baker IDI research fellow, Genevieve Healy, (pictured right) 

“Although many Australians have adopted the recommendation of getting at least 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity on at least five days of the week, we’ve been getting more overweight.

“The most plausible explanation is that 30 minutes constitutes a very small proportion of waking hours.  It’s equally important to look at what the person is doing for the remaining 15 and-a-half hours of the day.  A person who follows the guidelines of 30 minutes of brisk walking and spends the other 97 per cent of waking hours sitting is ‘physically active’ according to public health guidelines.  However, the term ‘active couch potato’ is probably more appropriate,” Dr Healy says.

Dr Healy will be speaking more on her reseach at the Queensland Safety Conference in Brisbane, Australia on  18 June 2009.

Being competent is more than just passing the competencies

The SafetyAtWorkBlog article on OHS professional competence has generated some lively debate on a discussion forum of the American Society of Safety Engineers.  Jim Leemann makes a fundamental point

“Determining if someone is competent to do a job is totally different from determining if someone has mastered the competencies to do the job”.

This is an important element in the discussion on qualifications versus experience. Often it is the case of the technical qualifications gaining one an audience but experience that keeps the audience listening.  Jim expresses it this way

“My empirical research on competencies that distinguish superior performance has revealed that performance is driven more by behavioral competencies than technical competencies. In fact, mastering technical competencies only earns an OHS pro a seat at the decision-maker’s table; it has nothing to do with distinguished superior performance. In fact, technical competencies do not do anything to distinguish superior performance because decision-makers expect OHS pros to have mastered their technical competencies before engaging them in any decision-making processes; hence the reason they have been invited to the decision-making table.”

One engineer expressed views that often come up in discussions in this area – the feeling that experience is less valued than technical qualifications or, in some cases, one’s sphere of influence.

“…I have been in the EH&S field in some form or another for 25 plus years. I believe there is much to be said of the school of hard knocks or on the job learning. Bottom line I would find it very hard at least in North America to have a new regulator show up at my door with text books in hand and try and explian(sic) some of the regulation that I have worked with for years and determine I don’t know my job.“

Jim’s points may be the issues that have underpinned  concerns about the Australian processes for establishing a safety profession.

There is nothing uniquely OHS about this dichotomy but because health and safety in Australia has not matured to the extent it has in other countries the conflict is continuing.  Australia needs, and deserves, someone to cut through the political and personal agendas to implement much needed reform.  A good opportunity could have occurred with the establishment of Safe Work Australia but the heavy reform agenda of the Rudd government means that no department is going to taken on more than they have to.

Kevin Jones

© Workplace Safety Services P/L (ABN: 68091088621) and SafetyAtWorkBlog, 2008-2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kevin Jones and SafetyAtWorkBlog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Concatenate Web Development
© Designed and developed by Concatenate Aust Pty Ltd