I am proud to be one of the 50 Safety Ambassadors in support of Safe Work Australia Week for 2010. A list of Ambassadors is available at the Safe Work Australia website.
Safe Work Australia has a strong support role for the safety week events held in each of the Australian States as well as providing national safety awards each year following on from the State awards mostly held this week.
Please take advantage of the many events occurring in your State.
[“I reiterate my point that practical experience is the key, because if you do not use that “core body of knowledge” on a regular basis, then you will most likely forget what you have learned, or at a minimum it may become redundant.”]
It goes to the heart of what has to drive the core body of knowledge and accreditation.
Every qualification is no more (or less) than a catalyst for future learning. I heard someone mention there is a rule of thumb that any qualification, at any level, becomes redundant within 5 years after completing it if it isn’t supplemented with on-going learning.
Clearly the question of a minimum qualification to start the passage of on-going learning has to be informed by the complex thing of describing a core body of knowledge. A complex project can only be dealt with properly by dividing into discrete bunches of key issues. And ideally, that division should be done with as few preconceived ideas as possible.
For mine I think there have been some preconceived ideas brought to the project table that look like they are sending the project into a “solutions cul-de-sac”. Continue reading “Avoiding the OHS training dead-end”
The Safety Institute of Australia has been investigating the development of a “core body of knowledge” for OHS in Australia for some years. Recently the institute released a discussion paper on the proposed accreditation idea for OH&S professionals. There is some similarity to moves in other countries such as the UK and to the situation in Canada. Regular contributor Col Finnie comments below:
“……after a read of [the SIA document I] got very confused. As far as I can see the accreditation thing seems to not paying any regard to the VET (vocational education) sector, and all the OH&S related quals. Before I make any comment on the proposed accreditation paper I thought I should look for some clarification from people who are more aware of the nitty gritty. To that end I posted a topic on the SIA Educators forum [members only]. But to reach a bigger audience I have provided a reproduction of the SIA member’s forum post here.
It’s part question, part observation of what seems to be an anomaly in the way the accreditation conversation seems to be heading. I’m keen to see what you people reckon. Continue reading “What academic qualifications are needed to be a safety professional?”
Australian business groups have written an open letter to the New South Wales Government protesting about the decision to continue with some OHS processes specific to New South Wales regardless of previous commitments to support the harmonisation of OHS laws. As the letter was published as an advertisement (Page 6 of The Australian on 20 October 2010), it is not readily available online but the letter needs a little bit of deconstruction to better understand the politics and ideologies behind the letter and the business associations.
The letter says Australian industry signed on to the national harmonisation process because of the need for an effective way of improving safety, fair legal processes and national consistency. Yes, to some extent but more often industry groups have been calling for a reduction of red tape for the purpose of reducing administrative costs. Reducing the injuries and fatalities of workers is not the same as “improving the safety of Australia’s workplaces”.
The ideological gap is shown in the argument against the national imposition of “reverse onus of proof”. The letter uses Victoria as an example of a jurisdiction without the reverse onus of proof and says
“Victoria, which was used as the model for the new national laws and which does not have union prosecutions or reverse onus, has between 30% and 50% better safety outcomes than NSW depending on the measurement used“. (my emphasis)
What is a “better safety outcome”? Less deaths? Less cost to business? Is it fair to compare NSW to Victoria? And can the variation in “safety outcomes” be directly related to reverse onus of proof? Continue reading “Australian business is outraged over OHS changes but is it all piss and wind?”
Safety In Australia has posted an extraordinary article questioning the decision of the Safety Institute of Australia to proceed with a process to consider the expulsion of one of its members regardless of the member recently suffering a heart attack.
The article says that the SIA has received a doctor’s letter saying that Phil Kamay, the member in question, should not attend the special general meeting on health grounds but the SIA has decided to proceed regardless. Safety In Australia questions this decision on the grounds of fairness. It is unclear who, if anyone, will be presenting Kamay’s rebuttal of the accusations against him that have led to the expulsion moves.
On an unrelated note, it is understood that the SIA has two tables booked for Worksafe Victoria’s Safety Awards late next week and that Phil Kamay is a guest at one of those tables.
Kevin Jones
Guest contributor David Robertson discusses the differences between risk simulations and real risk data in relation to quad bike safety:
“The motion picture blockbuster “Avatar”, for the time we are in the cinema, would have us believe that Sam Worthington can turn into a giant blue man on a faraway planet. James Cameron used computers to deliver us this illusion. In science (and particularly with safety) we must be able to distinguish between computers that are valuable tools and computers that don’t represent reality. Dynamic Research, Inc.(DRI) chose 113 actual quad bike (ATV) accidents to simulate in a computer model.
The first table below shows the injuries DRI record as what really happened from all the 113 cases, but represented as approximate normalized injury cost (ANIC)*. When DRI’s computer runs the same cases, one would expect a similar result. The results are shown in the second table (ANIC), note the scale on the left has had to be changed (table 2 should be about 10 times taller if the same scale in table 1 was used) because head injuries rose from 360 points to well over 3000. Equally astonishingly is that abdomen injuries have vanished altogether and chest injuries dropped from 266 to a next to nothing (23). Asphyxiation was not even included in the computer model. Continue reading “Computer simulations of quad bike risks do not reflect reality”
The Australian OHS regulators struggle each year to make their annual safety week events last beyond the nominated week, the events and the newspaper advertisements. Queensland’s Workplace Health & Safety (WHSQ) has released two short films focussing on workplace incidents.
The McGuane film provides a chronology of Gavan McGuane going to work for 30 minutes and remaining in hospital with serious facial and eyesight problems for over 50 days.
There are telling comments from the McGuane family and his doctor about the personal cost of this workplace injury. Continue reading “Powerful short OHS films and long-term safety promotion”