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Welcome to the March edition!
I recently had the pleasure of meeting new NZISM chief executive Jeff Sissons during his visit to the Auckland branch. In his presentation he sketched the key milestones in health & safety – the stations of the cross, as he put it – starting with the Robens report in the UK and including the HSE Act 1992, Pike River, the Taskforce report, the creation of WorkSafe NZ, the HSW Act 2015, and Whakaari/White Island.
The Pike River and Whakaari tragedies cost multiple lives and deservedly attracted huge attention from media, the public, the regulator, and the courts.
But the attention rightly given to these fortunately rare disasters can serve to conceal an uncomfortable truth. Pike River cost 29 lives. Each year between two and three times as many workers die in traumatic work incidents. And each year 20 to 30 times as many workers die mostly unheralded deaths from illnesses caused by exposures at work – often years beforehand – to things hazardous to their health.
So while we must pay attention to multiple fatality incidents and learn the lessons from them, the brutal reality is that every day in Aotearoa, on average, two or three people will die due to their current or past work.
Safeguard editor
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We have a winner!
Congratulations to Jade Strampel, one of the respondents to the February edition’s opinion poll, whose name was drawn out of the hat. Jade wins two copies of the latest Safeguard to distribute wisely.
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Q1: Tom Oxley asks people this question: “How are you going, out of ten?” Right now, how are YOU going, out of ten?
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“It’s a nice way of gauging how someone is doing, but from an HSR’s perspective it’s the next step – the response – that is important. How should I – or the business – respond if the answer is ‘Today I’m feeling like a 1’? The response reflects the cultural maturity of the organisation.”
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Q2: Dan Davis suggests real engagement with workers involves a one-on-one conversation with no preconceived agenda and where the outcome is unknown. The encounter, therefore, carries some risk. What do you think of this approach?
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Great! I'm doing this already.
I'm intrigued. Sounds a bit scary but I'm willing to give it a go.
Not keen. I need a structured approach when talking to people.
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“I like to ask workers what is one thing you would do to improve safety. They always come up with simple but useful suggestions.”
“I make the effort to go out to our sites and talk to our mobile staff during breaks or walk-arounds. Keep it casual. People just start talking. Give the worker respect and it is reciprocated.”
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Q3: The Government has committed itself to reform H&S law and regulations but hasn't yet specified what this means. Which law or regulation should it start with, in your view?
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- Requirement for businesses to have the means to provide reparation to injured parties following prosecution (after Whakaari).
- We have the laws and regulations required. WorkSafe needs to start using them.
- Do a gap analysis on what prescriptive elements are missing. For example, noise was left out of the new legislation despite having clear guidelines. Instead it remains as a transitional regulation under the old regs.
- Revoke the Electrical (Safety) Regulations 2010, Schedule 1, part 2(p) Not prescribed electrical work/ work on electrical vehicles. The potential fire risk through unqualified work or repairs seems too high to allow an exemption from being prescribed electrical work.
- The HSW Act 2015. Approaching its tenth birthday, the time is ripe for review and reform.
- The HSW (General Risk and Workplace Management) Regs – the widest with the most practical reach.
- Mobile plant and traffic management on worksites.
- There’s not much wrong with the law and regs – it’s more how they’re implemented and regulated. As a former WorkSafe inspector, I’m aware the regulator says is about engage and educate first, enforce last. But they measure inspectors on the amount of enforcements they issue rather than adding meaningful value to a PCBU.
This edition’s ten-second opinion poll is to be found further down. Be sure to have a go!
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When the cupboard is bare (of ideas)
The landlord visits your premises and demands that you spend up large installing restraints for every cupboard and open shelf. Good idea or H&S gone mad? Take a look at this Safeguard Forum thread and make up your own mind.
UK: manslaughter conviction
A UK recycling company has been found guilty of corporate manslaughter and fined £2.15 million after an agency worker was killed by a loading shovel at a site in Hartlepool in January 2020.
The 32-year-old was returning from the site’s welfare cabins to his workstation on the picking line when he was run over by the vehicle in an incident the HSE inspector said could have been prevented if the company had implemented an alternative traffic route for pedestrians. Following the incident it took less than a week for the company to put an alternative traffic route in place.
A Crown Court trial found Ward Recycling, which went into liquidation in 2021, guilty of corporate manslaughter and of breaching H&S regulations. The HSE found the company’s lack of traffic management put pedestrians at risk of being struck by moving vehicles, including loading shovels.
The company was fined £1.75 million for corporate manslaughter and £400,000 for breaching health and safety regulations.
Before the Hartlepool incident the HSE had taken enforcement action at the company’s Middlesborough site over inadequate traffic management. The HSE had also visited the Hartlepool site during its commissioning and had asked questions about how mobile plant would be separated from pedestrians.
(Abridged from a story in the 11 March edition of Safeguard Update newsletter.)
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Learning teams and AI
“AI is a tool that we are adding to our professional toolkit to enable us to do deeper and richer analysis.”
Melbourne-based Art of Work director Kelvin Genn, co-presenting an NZISM webinar with consultant Moni Hogg, said the real issue in using AI tools – such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Miro and Tactiq – lies in the user’s ability to craft good questions.
He said Art of Work routinely records conversations with individuals and teams so that Tactiq can swiftly provide a summary of the discussion and the follow-up activities assigned. He showed the AI summary generated in a few seconds from a 58-minute meeting with multiple people.
The use of AI tools, said Genn, frees up the facilitator of a learning team to be able to focus more intently on the conversations and how they relate to the enquiry, and not be constrained by the need to take notes.
“It enables you as facilitator to have a richer interaction with the team.”
Moni Hogg said she typically uses Miro and Copilot together when running a learning team, doing the discovery work – what work is done and what helps and what hinders performance – with a team and using AI to analyse the feedback “pretty damn quick” during a break, so that when the team reconvenes she already has a draft for the team to consider, vote on and prioritise. “It feels like I’m on a turbo jetpack!”
She outlined the three steps necessary: understanding what kind of outcome is required; working out what prompts to give the AI tool; and using professional expertise to validate the output at the end.
“You’re trying to build trust between the learning team and the operational team which is sponsoring it. That is still your role.”
(Abridged from a story in the 11 March edition of Safeguard Update newsletter.)
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They said it # 1
“There is nothing to stop the Buttles, as WML’s shareholders, from advancing the necessary funds to cover that obligation. There may be no commercial basis for doing so, but many would argue there is an inescapable moral one.”
(Judge Evangelos Thomas during sentencing of Whakaari Management Ltd and other parties charged after the 2019 Whakaari eruption disaster.)
Asbestos register closed
After years on life support, WorkSafe’s self-reporting asbestos exposure registration has officially closed.
WorkSafe stopped accepting online registrations in December 2023, with information already on the register being held as a solution is worked on for managing the information in future. If a worker wishes to report asbestos exposure they must now do so through the generic WorkSafe online reporting form.
It’s a move Mike Cosman, director of consultancy Cosman Parkes, describes as no great loss, though he told Safeguard it does point to a bigger question of a lack of repositories for exposure and health monitoring data.
“It’s part of bigger story about how poor we still are at occupational health and that really there is an awful lot of activity taking place, but we are not maximising the benefit from utilising the data [from workplace health monitoring and exposure monitoring] from an epidemiological point of view, or in terms of understanding and analysing current and future risk.”
(Abridged from a story in the 26 February edition of Safeguard Update newsletter.)
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BIM: share it with the workers
Making use of 3D building information modelling (BIM) systems can help to achieve better design of both buildings and work methods, including the ability to design out risk – but the key is to involve from an early stage the people who will face those risks.
This was Safeguard’s takeaway message from sitting in on multiple quick-fire presentations on the use of BIM in practice, as featured in an Auckland seminar recently organised by BIMSafe.
Steel & Tube’s Christo Erasmus and Mikko Anzano talked about the “rough and dirty trade” that is installing reinforced steel. As a commodity product, the challenge was how to add value? In 2021 the company began using 3D BIM modelling to visually present the structure into which the reinforcing steel is to be placed, including gaps for underground services.
Anzano showed photos of the foundations of the IKEA store under construction at Auckland’s Sylvia Park. “How much time would you like to spend in that trench tying steel?” he asked. Instead, a precise cage of steel, designed and pre-fabricated offsite, can be dropped into the trench by crane.
“We don’t need to go into the trench. Without 3D it would be really hard to achieve.”
The precision of BIM measurements also means a huge reduction in re-work, such as doing last-minute bending of steel onsite because it is too short or long.
Another bonus is that the design is no longer “sitting in a guy’s head” but is now publicly available for sharing with others, such as concrete cutters.
(Abridged from a story in the 26 February edition of Safeguard Update newsletter.)
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CHASNZ’s wish-list: more enforcement
Construction Health and Safety New Zealand is urging the new Government to boost WorkSafe’s capacity to enforce the construction sector, noting that the active presence of inspectors on construction sites during the Christchurch rebuild was a key factor in the low rate of harm to construction workers.
In its Briefing to Incoming Ministers, CHASNZ says 11 percent of the workforce is employed in construction but that productivity growth lags behind other sectors, in part due to the one million construction working days lost each year to injury.
CHASNZ urges the government to act in three ways in order to reduce injuries and lift productivity. First, use government agencies’ 18% share of annual construction procurement to lift market standards by embedding strong safety requirements into procurement guidelines.
Second, CHASNZ calls for modernised regulations – not only the urgent completion of the long-delayed Plant and Structures regs, but for the creation of construction-specific regulations modelled on the UK’s CDM regs or their Australian equivalent. Such regulation, it says, would clarify the roles and responsibilities of each player in construction’s complex supply chains.
Third, CHASNZ calls for effective enforcement of a sector with low barriers to entry and some “unscrupulous” operators. WorkSafe, it says, needs to be resourced to regain its role as a visible and effective regulator of the sector.
“CHASNZ does not believe that reducing the level of assessment and enforcement activity is appropriate in a country with developing health and safety needs.”
(Abridged from a piece in the 26 February edition of Safeguard Update newsletter.)
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They said it #2
“Don’t rely on AI to do your analysis for you. Use it to inform your analysis of the learning team.”
(Kelvin Genn during an NZISM webinar on the use of AI in health & safety.)
Get your brand in front of Safeguard readers!
Advertising in Safeguard magazine or in our Safeguard online channels, or sponsoring one of our Safeguard events is an effective way to infiltrate your brand into the minds of influential decision makers (in a good way!). To discuss how this could work for your company get in touch with Chris Coomer, phone 021 193 4946 or chris.coomer@thomsonreuters.com
Recent publications
Opinion poll
Our simple multi-choice opinion poll asks about three matters raised in this edition:
- What use do you make of AI?
- How should the Buttle brothers respond to the judge’s challenge?
- How effective is WorkSafe’s online reporting system?
New Zealand Workplace Health & Safety Awards 2024
- ENTRIES CLOSE 5PM FRIDAY 5 APRIL
Did you know most award entries arrive in the last few days before the deadline?
So be sure to spend half an hour reflecting on your most successful health, safety or wellbeing initiatives over the last 24 months.
Also recall the key people behind them who went the extra mile to make good things happen. You know who they are.
Then enter your best initiative into an organisational category, and your best person into an individual category.
It's an easy process and entry is free!
Everything you need to know is in the entry pack which can be dowloaded here.
Women in Safety Conference 2024 - 2 May - Eden Park Auckland and Livestream
AIMING HIGHER
Safeguard is proud to present the 2nd Women in Safety Conference. Partnering with the Women in Safety Excellence NZ (WISE) network, this one-day conference aims to inspire women working in health and safety to set their sights on leadership and governance roles. View the agenda and register here
Safeguard National Health & Safety Conference 2024: Collaboration + Influence
The 2024 Safeguard conference is happening on 18-19 June at a new venue - The Viaduct Events Centre in Auckland. Early bird pricing is available until 7 May. Group rates are available - contact eventsanz@thomsonreuters.com for details. View all event information on the
Safeguard website.
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UPCOMING SAFEGUARD EVENTS
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UPCOMING SAFEGUARD EVENTS
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