workplace – Page 62 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

First Aid and Burns

The correct and established treatment for burns is

“.. to hold the burn under cool running water for at least 20 minutes”.

This reduces the continuing damage generated by burning tissue.

This has been the advice for decades and was recently reemphasised by the Victorian Government. So why are burn creams still on the market?

Perhaps there is a place for burn creams – when 20 minutes’ supply of cool running water is not available.

In December 2008, the Australian Defence Forces used burn cream. According to a media release

The ADF has been advised that four Iraqi civilian vehicles were damaged and two Iraqi men received superficial burns to their hands when they reportedly attempted to remove hot debris from their cars.

The Iraqi men were treated at the scene by Coalition Forces with burn cream.

Child Safety Australia recommends burn cream in a domestic first aid kit for the treatment of blisters.

The Australian Red Cross are emphatic, but allow room to move:

“NEVER use burn cream as an initial treatment. This should only be used a doctor’s recommendation.”

In 2003 (reference not publicly available), the Mayo Clinic in Rochester advised the following first aid treatments for burns

With chemical burns, make sure the chemical and any clothing or jewelry in contact with the chemical are removed.

Cool the burn under running water long enough to reduce the pain, usually 15 to 20 minutes. If this isn’t possible, immerse the burn in cold water or cover with cold compresses. Don’t put ice directly on the burn. Ice can cause frostbite and further damage.

Once the burn is cooled, apply a lotion or moisturizer to soothe the area and prevent dryness. Don’t apply butter. It holds heat in the tissues and may cause more damage.

Cover the burn with a sterile gauze bandage. Wrap loosely. Bandaging keeps air off the burn and reduces the pain.

Take an over-the-counter pain medication unless your doctor has told you to avoid these medications.

Don’t break blisters. If the blister is broken, wash with antibacterial soap and water, apply an antibiotic ointment and bandage.

No mention of burn cream and only an antibiotic cream in relation to blisters.

Safety professionals seek evidence, from which solid and valid decisions can be made. Why then does the initial treatment of burns have such a variety of advice? Can we simply put it down to the commercial desires of cream manufacturers? Or the lack of explanation from the defence forces?

I am old enough to have experienced my mother applying butter to my burns. We have had generational change in this treatment but how much more change would have occurred if workplace first aiders, and parents, had not had burn creams advocated as a legitimate first aid treatment?

Kevin Jones

Teenage worker’s death

AAP and The Australian newspaper today reported on the death of an 18-year-old in a factory located just north of SafetyAtWorkBlog’s office on 18 February 2009.

Initial reports say that the man was “dragged head first into a box-printing machine” when his clothing was caught. Firefighters took 45 minutes to extract the worker who died later in hospital.

It will be interesting to follow this case as the investigation and potential prosecution proceeds. It fits all the elements of safety campaigns over the last few years – young workers, inadequately guarded machines, risk assessments, risk controls, unnecessary deaths.

It is only a couple of months until International Workers’ Memorial Day when this worker’s name will be added to the annual roll-call of the dead.

Kevin Jones

Initial union comments on OHS Law Review Panel report

The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ submission to the national review of model OHS law was entitled “The Highest Standards For Harmonised OHS Law”. This is intriguing as the union movement is not happy with the concession that the final report of the review panel made concerning the right of a union to instigate and manage OHS prosecutions.

Geoff Fary, Assistant Secretary of the ACTU, told SafetyAtWorkBlog on 17 February 2009 said that the ACTU is still assessing the recommendations of the final review panel report and will probably release a more detailed response in early March 2009 but that the OHS harmonization process “should not result in a reduction in protection of workers’ entitlements or the rights of any group of workers.”

The ACTU has concerns

“if the result of this process is that the people who have benefited from that [right] no longer have it available. It therefore follows that one of the key things we are concerned about in the recommendation of the second report is that if it was adopted it would no longer be open for unions to initiate prosecutions when regulators fail to do so.”

Fary said that prosecutorial action by unions in New South Wales have always been successful and have lead to legislative change.

“Undoubtedly, in our view, the ability for unions to prosecute has been in the best interests of health and safety outcomes for workers.”

To some extent workers and the media are getting confused by the parallel reform processes of industrial relations and workplace safety. There is the potential for one stream to retard the process of the other. Geoff Fary said that this is unlikely as he thinks that the IR reforms could be “up and running before all of the OHS changes”.

Fary expressed the ACTU’s support for the declarations and actions of the International Labour Organisation but it is noted that media reports on 18 February illustrate that not all the union movement supports the ACTU President, Sharan Burrows’ perspective that Australia’s new industrial relations legislation meets international obligations “on balance”.

Kevin Jones

Edited audio of the interview with Geoff Fary can be accessed HERE

Previous SafetyAtWorkBlog postings concern Geoff are available

Response to National OHS Law Review

In the Australian Financial Review on 17 February 2009 (page 8 but not accessible online) Steven Scott reports that the Western Australian Treasurer Troy Buswell is in a stoush with the Federal government over OHS laws. They are not. Buswell is quoted as saying

“My view is that it’s much more appropriate to make sure you get it right… We will not be supporting the establishment of Safe Work Australia until we are in a position to commit ourselves to the full harmonisation process.”

Buswell wants more time and more information. He is also concerned about the (related) industrial relations changes. Only last week, Buswell was at a Senate Committee supporting West Australian businesses. The Treasurer’s stance is at least consistent and prepared for flexibility.

Michael Tooma, a labour lawyer with Deacons in Sydney, is reported as saying that

“These right of entry provisions could be used for ulterior purposes, either for a recruitment drive or as a way of causing industrial agitation….. It gives unions the right to use OHS as a Trojan Horse for the purpose of entry onto sites.”

In his initial analysis of the final report Tooma wrote

“The Panel took the view that union right of entry contributes in a positive manner to OHS compliance at a workplace level. It recommended that the model Act provide right of entry for OHS purposes to union officials and/or union employees formally authorised for that purpose under the model Act.”

and that

“These recommendations have the potential to industrialise the safety agenda.”

The review panel is acting on the fact that workplace safety is already industrialised and that those who continue to split to two areas are denying reality. OHS cannot be managed successfully without also working with the human capital and industrial relations context.

The right-of-entry provisions in any legislation is a hotly contested ideological battle and there is plenty of evidence through the many submissions to many OHS and IR reviews of this.

Right-of-entry is not a threat of punishment and is readily avoided through workplaces having active and functional methods of consultation and safety management.

Similarly, concerns are being raised over the introduction of Provisional Improvement Notices (PINs) in some jurisdiction. PINs are an acknowlegement of a breakdown in communication and a dysfunctional safety management system in the workplace. In some workplaces PINs are never applied because everyone talks about safety in an open and accountable fashion.

Many of the concerns being raised over this final review panel report can be addressed by safety professionals and advocates publishing examples of how alarming legislative provisions have proven to be non-starters. The power may be on the legal register but are infrequently applied.

When the new right-of-entry provisions were being introduced in Victoria, many lawyers and employer representatives said the world would collapse. It hasn’t and the sensible control and oversight of the process is now recommended across Australia.

It is perhaps time for WorkSafe Victoria to re-emphasise the success of the right-of-entry management process it has operated under for several years. John Merritt, CEO of WorkSafe Victoria has spoken very positively of the process. An information sheet on the issues for employers is also available.

Kevin Jones

Draft guidance on musculoskeletal injuries in mining

Any inquiry into musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) in any industry is of great interest to OHS professionals as MSD are the bane of the profession.

The New South Wales Dept of Primary Industries (DPI) is requesting public comment on a new MSD guidance for the mining and extractive industries. Below is some text from the media release

Industry comment is being sought by the Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD) Working Party on the guidance document The Management of Musculoskeletal Disorders in the Mining and Extractives Industry.

The benefits of the guide are that it;
• Facilitates sites taking planned preventative measures;
• Uses the capacities that already exist and;
• Provides effective tools for sites to use.

Comments are welcome on the guidance through the DPI website by close of business 27 March 2009.

Kevin Jones

National OHS Review – initial comments

Several OHS colleagues on an international discussion forum have expressed some opinions on the final report of the Australia’s National Model OHS Law review.

Safety Alerts

One asked that better and more frequent safety alerts be published by the regulators and that those reports be based on fatalities, injuries and near misses.

There is an inconsistency of incident reporting in Australia. For instance, emergency service departments have different ways of notifying the media of incidents. Most rely on regular (multiple times each day) visits to their websites. This option doesn’t work unless one has tracking software or are doing nothing else. Several distribute email bulletins on a daily basis. Most of the bulletins deal with traffic incidents, floods or bushfires, but several also report on emergency incidents to individuals and, although not explicit, many occur in workplaces.

Incident alerts from emergency services are good because it is a service that OHS regulators and enforcers also receive and act upon.

For many years, various Australia safety organisations have published OHS solutions databases or, initially, folders. The maintenance of these have fluctuated over the years in relation to technological change and political interest. It is pointless trying to establish a fixed-point or hard-copy library when the Internet is now the primary resource tool.

It should be added that considerable information can be garnered from court reports of OHS prosecutions however, the Magistrates’ Courts do not provide publicly accessible court reports so any matters heard at that level are rarely reported, except by someone who is sitting in the court. To gain a proper understanding of the OHS legislative process, coverage of all levels of legal action should be encouraged.

Risk Management

Another colleague expressed concern about the use of “risk” throughout the report. Below is a section of the report that explains the review panel’s approach:

“In Chapter 30, we discuss the role of the risk management process in the model Act. As we noted in our first report, risk management is essential to achieving a safe and healthy work environment. We found that risk management is implicit in the definition of reasonably practicable, and as such, need not be expressly required to be applied as part of the qualifier of
the duties of care. Further, as we discuss in this report, risks can be successfully managed without mandating hazard identification and risk assessment in all cases, particularly where the hazards are well known and have universally accepted controls.

Therefore we recommend that the model Act should not include a specific process of hazard identification and risk assessment, or mandate a hierarchy of controls, but that the regulation-making power in the model Act should allow for the process to be established via regulation, with further guidance provided in a code of practice, as is contemporary practice.
The application of risk management process should however be encouraged…” (page xviii)

Throughout the review process the Victorian OHS Act was the most influential piece of legislation and that Act removed the previous requirement to assess workplace risks to determine the most appropriate control measure. WorkSafe Victoria had, for years, advocated in its publications and guidelines to “Find-Assess-Fix”. The “Assess” was dropped in many instances as the suitable control measure had been well-established just not widely applied.

The WorkSafe position was in response to those business operators who may say “I don’t care how hazardous the bloody thing is just fix it!” It was hoped that this would save time and “unnecessary” paperwork, and that other State jurisdictions would take the same approach. None did, and the removal of “Assess” confused businesses and safety professionals as it is a major inconsistency with the Australian Standard on Risk Management.

WorkSafe tried to calm the confusion by saying that they still though assessing risks was a good idea for many new and developing hazards, just that assessment could be done away with as a legislative requirements in most instances.

It seems like the National Review Panel supports the Victorian approach to risk assessment. Not so long ago, the New South Wales government subsidised a lot of training for farmers and others in the agricultural sector on risk assessment. Now it will have to re-explain.

The other concern with the panel’s approach to risk assessment is that it sees risk management as fitting within “reasonably practicable”, a concept that SafetyAtWorkBlog is not convinced helps in managing safety. “Reasonably practicable” is a concept that is defined and refined through prosecutions and court processes, therefore, it can change and it is best interpreted by lawyers. OHS legislation was designed to be readily understood by the layman for where the responsibility for safety sits with the employer and, to a lesser extent, the employee. As soon as law firms are brought into the process, information is locked away under lawyer-client privilege, the cost of safety skyrockets and any safety management lessons are delayed until the court case is heard (or not heard) years later.

It should be remembered that the National OHS Model Law was about the law relating to workplace safety not the implementation of safety management. It is this differentiation that needs to be constantly pushed to the government to avoid workplace safety becoming a management task that cannot be undertaken without a lawyer watching intently over one’s shoulder all the time.

Kevin Jones

Eye injury statistics for workplaces

In early February 2009, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released a statistical report on eye injuries in Australia. There was a small chapter on eye injuries that occurred in workplaces. Seeing as how the readers of SafetyAtWorkBlog love statistical reports, some of the data is presented below.

For further data, and graphs, it is recommended you download the report.

According to the report, Eye-related injuries in Australia,

A total of 8,640 workers compensation claims with eye injury or disease as the primary diagnosis were contained in the NOSI database for the period July 1999 to June 2005.

Median time lost because of eye injury in total decreased from 2.0 weeks in 2000-01 to 1.6 weeks in 2004-05. In 2004-05, injuries described as ‘eye: other and multiple’ resulted in the longest median time loss (2.0 weeks).

Tag: workplace

First Aid and Burns

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Teenage worker’s death

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Initial union comments on OHS Law Review Panel report

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Response to National OHS Law Review

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Draft guidance on musculoskeletal injuries in mining

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National OHS Review – initial comments

Safety Alerts

Risk Management

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Eye injury statistics for workplaces

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Safety Alerts

Risk Management

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