transport – Page 46 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Beware the OHS hype on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

World COPD day was held on 17 November 2008. COPD Stands for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As with many of these health-related days there is more hyperbole than substance and often the most relevant information appears after the hype has died down. This is the case with a report just released by the Occupational And Environmental Medicine. [[Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease mortality in railroad workers Online First Occup Environ Med 2008; doi 10.1136/oem/2008.040493]]

According to a media statement that accompanied the report:

They wanted to gauge the long term effects of diesel exhaust on the risks of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), an umbrella term for progressive lung diseases, such as emphysema and bronchitis.

In 1946, just 10% of rolling stock was diesel powered; by 1959, virtually all rolling stock was.

The researchers checked the health records of the US Railroad Retirement Board, which has maintained digital records of all its employees since 1959, including a yearly listing of all job codes and time spent in post.

Anyone working on the trains (conductors, engineers, brakemen) was considered to have been exposed to diesel exhaust.

Those working in ticketing, signalling, maintenance, admin, and as station masters, were regarded as not having been exposed.

The results showed that those who had been exposed to diesel exhaust were more likely to die of COPD than their peers who had not been so exposed.

The risks increased by 2.5% with each year of employment among those who were recruited after conversion from steam to diesel locomotives.

This risk fell only slightly after adjusting for smoking, a known risk factor for COPD.

Of all the reports that were released in the last two weeks, this one is the clincher because it shows that smoking did not have an appreciable effect on the health findings. There is a direct relationship between a work activity in a work environment and worker health.

This correlation is sadly lacking from other COPD data which reads primarily as a new spin on anti-smoking campaigns.

According to the International COPD Coalition (“a nonprofit organization composed of COPD patient organizations around the world, working together to improve the health and access to care of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease”)

World COPD Day 2008 features new patient and health professional initiatives that address the misconceptions and lack of awareness surrounding chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). These misconceptions – revealed in a global survey, the International COPD Coalition (ICC) Report – include poor public awareness that smoking is the main cause of COPD, a failure to diagnosis COPD in its early stages, when medication can be used to prevent further lung deterioration, and a mistaken belief that initial COPD symptoms, like coughing and shortness of breath, are a normal consequence of aging.

We may be unaware smoking leds to COPD but we are well aware that smoking can kill you. Whether it is emphysema, lung cancer, heart disease or COPD doesn’t change the fact that smoking increases the risk of premature death. It is insulting that a “World Anti-Smoking Day” needs to masquerade under a new health risk.

For those workers who have suffered work-related respiratory problems the Queensland governmenthave released a very good guide for those who have breathing difficutlies or for those who look after them – the Better Living With COPD – A Patient Guide (pictured below)

Important victory for aircraft maintenance workers

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs may have to pay compensation to the maintenance crews of F-111 fighter planes. In the 1970s employees worked within the fuel tanks of the fighters with little, if any, PPE. In 2004 these workers were excluded from a healthcare and compensation scheme even though, according to one media report, evidence was presented that the workers had

a 50% increased risk of cancer
a two-fold increase in obstructive lung disease;
a two-and-a-half fold increase in sexual dysfunction; and
a two-fold increase in anxiety and depression.

One of the reasons the maintenance crews were denied compensation was that the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) had destroyed the maintenance records from before 1992.

An inquiry into the affair has received a submission from the commonwealth Ombudsman, John McMillan, and Labor MP, Arch Bevis, that strongly criticised the destruction and inadequacy of records.

In safety management, record-keeping is often seen, and dismissed, as “red tape”. The reduction of red tape is not the elimination of red tape and the reality of Australia’s increasing litigious legal system is that more records need to be kept, and for longer, than ever before.

Perhaps, the government, in its pledge to reduce red tape and business costs, should look at the lawyers’ insistence to business that the first port-of-call after an industrial incident is to call them so that everything becomes covered by legal-client privilege.

Perhaps it is the pressure to create paperwork than the paperwork itself that is the problem. In the case of the F-111 maintenance crews, regardless of the lack of paperwork, justice seems to be happening. It is just sad that so much pain and suffering had to be endured before getting close to a resolution.

Click HERE for a personal reflection on the health issues of the workers from one of Australian Rugby League’s champions, Tommy Raudonikis.

Maintaining professional standards by looking outside the discipline

I am a great believer that solutions to hazards in one industry can be applied or adapted to other industry sectors. Regular readers of SafetyAtWorkBlog are aware of the cross-referencing between general workplace hazards and some solutions from the sex industry.

However, solutions can come from other countries as well, and not just from the United States. Last week, a car bomb set off by Basque separatists in the University of Navarra in the northern city of Pamplona resulted in 248 people being treated for respiratory trouble, coughing and nausea from inhaling unidentified gases. A university spokesperson, Javier Diaz, reportedly said that the fumes were generated by repair works that “are related to the terrorist attack.”

This occurred seven years after the 9/11 attacks in New York and after the resultant and widespread reporting of persistent health issues suffered by relief workers and emergency services personnel. Yes, fumes are different from airborne particles of asbestos but the hazard, and the control mechanisms, are similar. The lessons of exposure by emergency workers in disasters are obviously still to be learnt.

This morning, 10 November 2008, we wake up to a Russian submarine disaster that immediately reminds us of the tragedy of the Kursk in 2000. Overnight 200 submariners and shipyard workers were affected in the K-152 Nerpa submarine from exposure to freon gas. Three servicemen and seventeen civilians have died. Initial reports say that the gas was released when the fire extinguisher system was activated.

Russian submarines off the east coast of Russia can easily be dismissed by newspaper readers and business professionals as largely irrelevant but the media has said that

“A Russian expert has reportedly said that a lack of gas masks among too many untrained civilians may have elevated the death toll in the submarine.”

Does insufficient PPE and training sound familiar? The release of gas in a restricted area?

For OHS professionals everything is relevant to making the best decisions possible for clients and employers. The trick is to allocate the appropriate level of relevance to the information. Risk managers and OHS professionals need to filter information from the widest possible pool of knowledge in order to provide the best advice.

We are not all Russian shipyard workers in a just-built submarine but, increasingly, we could be helping people from the rubble of a collapsed building, or helping in the aftermath of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, or advising on a fire safety procedure and safe design of buildings. We need to read, listen and digest so as to maintain and improve our personal core body of knowledge.

Discrimination and OHS information in languages other than English

One of the most ignored OHS obligations in Australian workplace is to provide safety information in a language other than English. Most workplaces in a multicultural society struggle greatly with this obligation and, more often than not, rely on employees to pass on OHS information to their colleagues in the employee’s language.

This translation is an integral part of a safety management system and needs to be well-considered when developing and operating a system. OHS professionals need to be assured that the correct OHS information is getting to where it is needed and understood at that point.

A recent discrimination case that illustrated these issues occurred in the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal (Tanevski vs Fluor Australia P/L [2008] 7 August 2008). The tribunal found that Fluor had indirectly discriminated against Mr Tanevski (a Fluor employee since 2003 and with 314 years as a supervisor in rail maintenance) by placing a literacy requirement on him that he was unable to meet and that the tribunal found to be unreasonable.

A safety report had highlighted the “management of low English literacy standards of personnel” as a high priority for improvement. Mr Tanevski had been demoted from his role as a supervisor over concerns about his literacy level in relation to complying with the requirements under its OHS management system. The tribunal found that the company’s concerns were legitimate but unreasonable as

“there was a feasible, low cost alternative which did not involve any increased risk to safety…[to].provide him with training on the new HSE system, instruct him on how to complete the necessary forms and assist him with the duties, such as writing statements and reports, which he was unable to perform”.

In other words, the company needed to support the operation of the safety management system by helping the people who need to use it.

There is also another point to make from an OHS management perspective. Should not the new HSE system have accommodated the known literacy needs of existing employees? Information in the decision says that Mr Tanevski was a five-year employee with the company and there were no concerns with his work performance, indeed testimonials spoke otherwise.

The New South Wales OHS Act 2000 states

“An employer must ensure the health, safety and welfare at work of all the employees of the employer.
That duty extends (without limitation) to the following:…
(d) providing such information, instruction, training and supervision as may be necessary to ensure the employees’ health and safety at work,…”

The Victorian OHS Act is more specific:

“An employer must, so far as is reasonably practicable—………..
(c) provide information to employees of the employer (in such other languages as appropriate) concerning health and safety at the workplace…….”

The rail safety legislation may have obligations specifically to that industry. Both OHS regulators, WorkCover NSW and WorkSafe Victoria, have guidance notes on how to provide OHS information in languages other than English. WorkSafe Victoria also lists the language needs of employees as a necessary element in any OHS training needs analysis.

The Tanevski case may also have been dealt with by WorkCover NSW but that the issue came up through legal action on discrimination in a non-OHS tribunal, illustrates that OHS professionals cannot rely only on information provided by the OHS regulators.

Using workers compensation claims as exit strategies

There have been two instances in Australia in the last week where workers compensation claims have made the news. The first was in relation to the suicide attempt by Tasmanian politician, Paula Wriedt. She has revealed that after the break-up of her marriage she had an affair with one of the government chauffeurs, Ben Chaffey.

According to one media report, Chaffey has argued

“that his employment became untenable as a result of the relationship and his employer’s response to it. He is seeking a severance payment thought to be about $A140,000 to compensate for this, and for stress and harm suffered.”

It is also reported that he has been on “stress leave” for several months.

The other case involves unfair dismissal action being taken by public transport ticket inspector, Glenn Hoyne in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) against his dismissal by Connex. Hoyne made accusations on a Melbourne talkback radio show about Connex setting quotas for issuing ticket infringement notices and that inspecting was a revenue-raising exercise only.

Connex investigated the claims and described the allegations as “bribery, blackmail or extortion”.

Hoyne took leave in December 2007 and submitted a workers compensation claim due to work-related stress. The situation was clearly tense.

The AIRC Deputy President, Brian Lacy, described Hoyne’s actions as not a threat to Connex but

“some sort of industrial claim, albeit misguided, for a severance payment.”

These two cases illustrate how murky human relations, and human resources, can be. Both parties are seeking recompense for actions that are work-related and both actions will result in a resolution. But neither will generate any real preventive action. One claim has been described as a pitch for a severance payout and the other is stress from a broken work-related relationship and the employer’s response to a sexual relationship.

When did people begin to expect a monetary payout above their entitlements for leaving a job that they didn’t like or for when a relationship with a work colleague ended?

A law firm newsletter from 2005 reported on a case of a stress claim, which may provide a counterpoint to the situations above:

“The employee claimed, and was successful in establishing that his stress was directly caused by his employer’s failure to keep him informed of changes in the workplace. In essence, the prospect of redundancy was seen as a sufficient causative factor in the employee’s work related injury.”

The newsletter goes on to advise

“employers must assess the circumstances and sensitivities of individual workers when making management decisions in order to avoid stress claims being made or where claims are made, to avoid liability for such claims.”

Maybe this is the only safety management lesson we can learn from the unhappy ticket inspector and the stressed-out chauffeur, manage your people well.

Irrational decision-making

Occupational health and safety often gets sidetracked from the main issue of preventing injury and illness at work. I often hear employers, particularly in small business, complaining that their workers continue to do the wrong thing even though the employers have done everything they can think of.

Sometimes an approach is offered that seems like a quick-fix to all the safety problems. The one that always annoys me is behavioural-based safety. BBS is like the Hydra and reappears regularly in different guises and with different jargon.

A podcast crossed my desktop this morning that provides a different perspective on “why rational people make irrational decisions”.

The podcast illustrates the conflicts in trying to make the right decision by discussing the decision of a pilot in the Canary Islands who caused a major crash. The pilot was also the head of safety at KLM Airlines.

The podcast does not focus on workplace safety but the discussion is probably the better for it.

Don’t rely on alarms

The Australian media has been following the investigation into the crash of a light aircraft that was travelling to Benalla on July 28, 2004. There was a report on 5 August about a family who will be suing Queensland Rail over the serious bashing of a relative. Different stories, different states, different modes of transport, but both stories of sadness.

Both stories illustrate an important reminder for the management of safety in workplaces and in public – alarms are there for a reason.

According to media, Barbara Lillicrap, the widow of bashing victim, Scott Lillicrap, said witnesses had pushed the emergency button at the station at least three times, but rail officers believed it to be a prank and ignored it.

A newspaper report says that air traffic controller Stuart Hodge said that an alert was sounded when the plane veered off course before approaching Benalla Airport. Mr Hodge said false alarms were common and there was a culture among air traffic controllers to ignore them.

These two reports also need to remind safety professionals that alarms are simply audible signs to which people need to respond, or at least acknowledge. An ignored sign is a useless control measure and if this is likely to occur, then a higher order of control measure needs to be implemented to control the hazard.

(Don’t get me started on signs at level crossings!)

Category: transport

Beware the OHS hype on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

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Important victory for aircraft maintenance workers

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Maintaining professional standards by looking outside the discipline

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Discrimination and OHS information in languages other than English

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Using workers compensation claims as exit strategies

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Irrational decision-making

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Don’t rely on alarms

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