The South Australian government has launched a website focusing on young people at work, not surprisingly called Youth@Work.
South Australia has a habit of marching to a slightly different beat to the dominant Australian States on OHS. They did not follow WorkSafe Victoria’s “Homecomings” ads and they have been well ahead of anyone in researching and explaining the relevance of wellness as an OHS issue.
As mentioned last month in SafetyAtWorkBlog, the Victoria-designed “Homecomings” advertisements are to be launched on United States television. The Department of Labor & Industries for Washington State announced the ads on 19 May 2009. According to the DL&I media release
“These ads are particularly effective at bringing home the importance of safety in the workplace and the effects it can have on so many people,” said Don Brunell, president of the Association of Washington Business. “When an accident happens at work, it affects everyone – family, friends and co-workers.”
One ad is available for viewing at http://www.lni.wa.gov/main/worksafe/
[It looks like parts needed to be re-filmed to show left-hand drive vehicles and obviously the music rights for Dido’s song couldn’t apply in the US]
Victoria’s WorkHealth program is due to roll-out its next stage of worker health assessments. However, the program has been seriously curtailed by the failure of its funding model. According to The Age newspaper on 18 may 2009, employer associations have begun to withdraw their support compounding the embarrassment to the Premier, John Brumby, who lauded the program in March 2008.
The Master Builders Association will not be supporting the program due to WorkHealth’s connection with WorkSafe. The Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce (VACC) thinks likewise. There are concerns over the privacy of worker health records and that data from health checks may affect worker’s compensation arrangements or future claims.
The VACC is also concerned that employers will be blamed for issues over which they have little control – the health of their workers.
Many of these concerns could have been addressed by locating WorkHealth in the Department of Health, where health promotion already has a strong role and presence. It is understood that the funding of WorkHealth from workers compensation premium returns on investment caused the program to reside within the Victorian WorkCover Authority. There has also been the suggestion that WorkHealth was a pet program of the WorkCover board.
The program aims of free health checks for all Victorian workers was admirable and still achievable but the program was poorly introduced, poorly explained, based on a flawed funding model and now seems to be, if not dead, coughing up blood.
WorkSafe Victoria is very involved with moves to improve the professionalism of OHS practitioners in Australia. There is no doubt that improvements are required but the role of a state-based regulator in a non-regulatory system is curious. Surely such changes should be run from a national perspective
Safety professionals often look at the prominence, influence and market share of professional organisations for the doctors or the accountants. In Australia, at the moment, the health care profession’s accreditation/registration process is having a new structure introduced. After a long review process the Australian Health Workforce Ministerial Council identified these areas for change
This third point is an excellent one and so easily applied to the safety profession and the practitioners. “Specialist” and “generalist” seems to reflect the composition of the safety industry in Australia. There are those on the shopfloor or offices who deal with hazards on a daily basis. There are those who research and write about safety. And there are those who are a bit of both. The two category system of accreditation seems simple and practical and readily understood by those outside of the profession.
These points deal with matters sorely lacking from many areas of the safety profession – independence, transparency, skills maintenance, a clear and independent complaints procedure, diverse representation and a formal regulatory agency.
To this SafetyAtWorkBlog would add the concept of a Safety Industry Ombudsman for it is always necessary to have someone watching the “watchmen”.
Currently the Australian safety profession is part way through a mish-mash of a process of professionalisation. Surely it would be better to follow the most contemporary of processes being implemented by health care and others. Such a process would take some time and require support from the various disciplines of safety and the government. More importantly, it may require “vision” but during this time of substantial change in OHS legislation and regulatory structure, it is surely the right time to bring in long-term structural change to a profession that would benefit business and the public very well indeed.
The tricky thing about getting safety right is making sure you are on top of where the dangers are. One danger that seems to be consistently “off the safety radar” for lots of workplaces, particularly small businesses, is falls.
Here’s some key stuff you need to be looking at:
Preventing falls is an excellent example of why the common legal duty to first look to eliminate a hazard or risk is a clever thing. I get the sense that lots of people quickly dismiss elimination as a viable option; it shouldn’t be the case. Hard thinking about elimination solutions needs to be first cab off the rank in risk control decisions, particularly when it comes to preventing falls.
SafetyAtWorkBlog has no expertise in the control of infectious diseases. Any enquiries received on the issue are directed to the official information on government websites such as Australia’s Dept for Health & Ageing or the US Centre for Disease Control, or international authorities such as WHO.
But this creates a dilemma for OHS regulators. If the regulator does nothing, it is seen as inactive – a bad thing. Or the regulator can issue its own guidance on infection control – a good or bad thing. It is an unenviable choice.
WorkSafe Victoria took the latter choice and issued their “OHS preparedness for an influenza pandemic: A guide for employers” in early May 2009. The guide is not intended to be definitive and may be useful in the future but infectious outbreaks can move rapidly and, to some extent, this document is shutting the door after the horse has bolted, in expectation of the next “door”.
The guide mentions the following sources but it could be asked what is gained by contextualising these Australian documents? Why not just direct companies to the raw documents?
The trap for producing localised guides is that recommendations may be made that are out-of-place, difficult to implement and, ultimately, question the credibility of the document. WorkSafe fell for this trap by specifying some recommendations for the legitimate control measure of “social distancing”.
In its employers guide it makes the following recommendations:
“A primary transmission control measure is social distancing, that is reducing and restricting physical contact and proximity. Encourage social distancing through measures such as:
- allowing only identified, essential employees to attend the workplace
- utilising alternative work options including work from home
- prohibiting handshaking, kissing and other physical contact in the workplace
- maintaining a minimum distance of one metre between employees in the workplace (person-to-person droplet transmission is very unlikely beyond this distance)
- discontinuing meetings and all social gatherings at work including informal spontaneous congregations
- closing service counters or installing perspex infection control barriers
- using telephone and video conferencing.”
The guide does recommend social distancing as part of a risk management process but “prohibiting handshaking, kissing and other physical contact in the workplace”? “Discontinuing … informal spontaneous congregations”?
How is a business expected to police these sorts of measures? Have someone walking the workplace reminding workers of the new “no touchy” policy?
The Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza talks repeatedly about social distancing in workplaces, the community and families but never goes to the extent WorkSafe has.
The National Action Plan for Human Influenza Pandemic (NAP) defines social distancing as:
“A community level intervention to reduce normal physical and social population mixing in order to slow the spread of a pandemic throughout society. Social distancing measures include school closures, workplace measures, cancellation of mass gatherings, changing public transport arrangements and movement restrictions.”
NAP does not mention kissing, nor does the Business Continuity Guide For Australian Businesses .
WorkSafe WA has not issued anything specific on pandemic influenza, nor has SafeWorkSA, WorkCover NSW defers to NSW Health (which has a lot of information and a reassuring video from the health officer), and Queensland’s OHS regulator defers to its State health department.
Social distancing is an appropriate hazard control measure amongst other measures in an influenza risk management plan but the current WorkSafe Victoria guidance seems to be an unnecessary duplication, and on the matter of kissing, silly. Why, oh why did WorkSafe Victoria think it necessary to publish anything?
This week workplace safety on a building site received a much needed dose of humour. The Australian show “ThankGod, You’re Here” had a comedian enter a pretend building site and have to face questions from an OHS inspector as if he was the owner of the site.
The sketch has added impact because of its timing. It is hard to imagine this occurring ten years ago in a society and industry where OHS compliance was less valued, when hardhats were considered optional and when brightly-coloured vests looked stupid. That the sketch is funny is a measure of how OHS regulation and enforcement has matured and just how successful the OHS regulators have been in changing the society’s attitudes to workplace safety in Australia.
Also, it shows something more illustrative of comedy, more true. In the sketch there are some wonderful stunts done by a small earthmover. Only last year there was outrage, and fines, over some forklift stunts done for real by a young driver in Melbourne. The environment makes the difference between laughter and outrage.
The success of the TV show’s concept is also indicated by the issue of the 12-year-old welder on the building site. The comedian, Merrick Watts, removes the issue of age by insisting the young boy is actually in his fifties and just looks younger.
WorkSafe Victoria, whose logo is worn by the pretend inspectors in the sketch, have said that they did not pay for brand placement and that the show did not belittle the work they do. In fact the show “actually showed that we have a job to do and that there are good reasons for it.”
