WorkSafe – Page 69 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

CEO changes in Australian OHS

As safety professionals start to return to work in Australia after their Summer break, speculation for 2010 increases.

Many are wondering who will replace John Merritt as the executive Director of WorkSafe Victoria? The appointment process is likely to take a couple of months but there are several possible candidates.

One could be Julia Davison of WorkCover South Australia. On 15 January 2010 the chair of the WorkCover SA board, Philip Bentley, informed the IR Minister that Davison will be leaving her CEO position in mid-2010. The timing is good. Continue reading “CEO changes in Australian OHS”

Politics and safety in California

Workplace safety, as is any legislation, is subjected to the political whims and decisions of whichever political party is in power at the time. In Australia, John Howard’s conservative government almost halved the already meagre budget of the National OHS Commission, stopping many of the programs of national OHS uniformity that are now being resurrected by the Labor Government of Kevin Rudd.

On 14 January 2010 an investigative report into the operation of Cal-OSHA by KCET says that there was a marked change in the enforcement policies of Cal-OSHA shortly after the election of Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California. Continue reading “Politics and safety in California”

Changing the OHS guard

John Merritt is leaving WorkSafe Victoria to head up the Environmental Protection Authority. Nothing special in such a move as such progression is part of many senior executive public servant’s career plans. But Victoria’s politicians have started to use this change for political point-scoring on the basis that Merritt is married to Victorian parliamentarian, Maxine Morand.

This is unfortunate but not surprising. The political argy-bargy implies that John Merritt is undeserving of his new appointment and this is not the case.

I have met John Merritt over a number of years and from before he became the executive director of WorkSafe in 2001. During his time with the National Safety Council of Australia, there was an air of optimism in this moribund organisation, the same air he brought to WorkSafe. I interviewed him regularly

Continue reading “Changing the OHS guard”

Cabinet-making compliance

In March 2008, in Western Australia, a 22-year-old worker was crushed to death when a stack of veneered chipboard sheets toppled onto him. This sparked an audit campaign of the cabinet-making industry in 2009 by WorkSafe WA about which some results were released on 12 January 2010.

Such results are not often covered in this blog but the number of improvement notices provide a useful summary of the persistent hazards present in this industry and on machinery that is used in a variety of workplaces. Continue reading “Cabinet-making compliance”

Forklift death and safety posters

Twelve days in 2010 and Victoria has experienced its first workplace death and it was due to the use of a forklift. A 60-year-old man was crushed after a load being removed from a truck by forklift fell.

According to WorkSafe Victoria:

“…the man was guiding a forklift driver who was to remove the computer equipment weighing some 200kg and standing about 2m high, from the back of a semi-trailer. The equipment was on castors and not mounted on a pallet.”

As part of WorkSafe ongoing campaign on forklift safety, it has issued two safety posters. Originals should be available through the local WorkSafe Victoria offices.

Quad bike safety sensitivities

The quad bike safety issue is hotting up on a range of fronts in Australia with the trade unions taking an active interest, meetings between bike manufacturers and safety designers, and the SafetyAtWorkBlog email box filling up with background content and opinion.

One of these emails reminded me of some court action that was taken in 2005 by Honda against the Victorian State Coroner, Graeme Johnstone. Johnstone only recently retired from the position after many years and over that time there were fewer more ardent safety advocates, particularly not any that had the same broad audience and media attention.

In 2005 Johnstone was conducting an inquest into several quad-bike related deaths. At one point he approached a witness outside of the Coronial process to seek their assistance in a training course. Representatives from Honda took exception to this and began court action in the Supreme Court of Victoria to have him dismissed from conducting the inquests.

Justice Tim Smith found Johnstone remained open-minded and impartial throughout the inquest but the unreported judgement available online illustrates some of the tensions of the time and continue to exist to this day.

The judgement mentions the purpose of the inquest:

“The major disputed issues in the inquest relevant to the present application were the following:

whether the lack of roll-over structures on their ATVs caused the death of Mr Crole and Dr Shephard

whether roll-over structures should be installed on ATVs

whether the question of the provision of roll-over structures for ATVs should be investigated further.”

In describing the context of Johnstone’s contact with the witness, Dr Raphael Grzebieta, the judgement hints at the Coroner’s inquest findings (which are not available online)

“In addition, notwithstanding Dr Grzebieta’s conclusion that Dr Shepherd and Mr Crole [the deceased] would have been saved by the fitting of the roll bars and that this would be sufficient to justify a recommendation that they be fitted, the coroner expressed a provisional view that:

“My view at the moment is that it does not give me enough to recommend roll-over protection.””

The Victorian Coroner continues to be active in investigating quad-bike related deaths as seen in this newspaper article from earlier in 2009. A related article quotes John Merritt, WorkSafe’s executive director as saying:

“This inquest came about as a result of a terrible spate of fatalities in the past two years… WorkSafe’s position on this is clear. It believes that a quad bike is like any piece of farming equipment and those who use them need the appropriate training to be able to use them safely.”

If a quad bike is like any other piece of farming equipment, the equipment designers would be reviewing their designs to minimise the risk of injury as the field bin and silo manufacturers have, or the milk vat designers have or the windmill manufacturers have or, indeed , as have the tractor manufacturers who actively promote the safety features of their new tractors.

The unreported Supreme Court judgement provides a good indication of the major players in the quad bike safety discussion, particularly the expert witnesses for and against.

Many of the issues are resurfacing because safety and work practices continue to change and the only satisfactory resolution is when hazards are controlled and harm is reduced and, hopefully, eliminated. 2010 in Australia looks set to be a year when quad bike safety gets a good going over once more.

Kevin Jones

New guidelines on aggression in health care

WorkSafe Western Australia and the other OHS regulators in Australia have produced a very good, and timely, guideline for the “Prevention and Management of Aggression in Health Services“.

The hazard has existed for many years and hospitals, in particular, are torn between the competing priorities of keeping their staff safe and maintaining contact with their clients. Glass screens and wire are effective barriers to violent attacks but it can be argued that such structures encourage aggression by implying that “violence happens here”.

The guidelines, or what the regulators call a “handbook for workplaces” (How does that fit in with the regulatory hierarchy for compliance?), provides good information on the integration of safe design into the health service premises. But as with most of the safe design principles, as is their nature, they need to be applied from initial planning of a facility and so, therefore, are not as relevant to fitting-out existing facilities. In health care, it often takes years or decades before upgrades are considered by the boards and safe design is still a new concept to most.

Another appealing element of the guide is that it does not only consider the high customer churn areas such as casualty or emergency. It is good to see the important but neglected issue of cash handling mentioned even in a small way.

Another positive is the handbook includes a bibliography. This is terrific for those who want to establish a detailed understanding of the issues and the current research. For the OHS regulators, it allows them to share the burden of authority. Just as in writing a blog, by referencing source material the reader understands the knowledge base for the opinions and the (blog) writer gains additional credibility by showing they have formed opinions and advice from the most current sources.

Having praised the bibliography, it is surprising that of all the Claire Mayhew publications and papers mentioned her CCH book “Guide to Managing OHS Risks in the Health Care Industry”, was omitted.

The regulators have often had difficulty determining whether checklists or assessment forms should be included in their guidances. In Victoria one example of the conflict was in the Manual Handling Code of Practice that included a short and long assessment checklist. Hardly anyone looked beyond the short version and many thought this undercut the effectiveness of the publication.

The fact is that safety management takes time and business want to spend as little time on safety as possible but still get the best results. Checklists are an audience favourite and contribute to more popular and widely read guidelines, and broad distribution of the safety message is a major aim.

Interestingly amongst the checklist in this health services aggression publication a staff survey has been included.

(At least) WorkSafe WA has listened to the frustrations of readers who download a PDF version but then have to muck about with, or retype, the checklists. This handbook is also available as an RTF file for use in word processing.

This is the first OHS publication that has come out from a government regulator with this combination of content, advice and forms. It is easy to see how this will be attractive to the intended health services sector.

Kevin Jones

Category: WorkSafe

CEO changes in Australian OHS

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Politics and safety in California

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Changing the OHS guard

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Cabinet-making compliance

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Forklift death and safety posters

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Quad bike safety sensitivities

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New guidelines on aggression in health care

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