Safety News!

Harmonisation – Work Health & Safety Act 2011

Hopefully by now, most employers (now called PCBUs (persons in control of business or undertakings) under the Work Health & Safety Act 2011 & Regulations are aware that it is a case of “out with the old and in with the new”. The “old” Act which has been a fixture since 1985 has gone and with the newer legislation comes some specific requirements.
How you can deal with the changes (and meet compliance) is set out below. This list is not exhaustive and is meant to give an overview of what is needed.
You can start by:
 Developing an environment of strong safety leadership within your workplace. Leadership starts at the top and with good leadership a healthy and mature safety culture will develop and grow.
 Ensuring processes are in place for identifying and managing WHS risks. The expectation is that risk management practices will determine how the business runs and any risk assessment needs to be documented.
 Undertaking a gap analysis to understand how your organisation is placed to manage WHS and how it needs to change to achieve compliance.
 Reviewing your organisational structure to determine where responsibility for WHS lies. The position of WHSO has been removed from legislation and workplaces of 30 or more workers are not required to have a designated safety officer. Therefore the use of a locum safety advisor/consultant is becoming popular across industries.
Please feel free to call our DP Safety Services Division for a free preliminary chat about how we can help.
 Providing officers of your organisation with clear guidelines on the extent of their duties and what they need to do to satisfy the ‘due diligence’ requirement of their duty. Officers who play a major role in running the business e.g. CEO’s, General Managers, Chief Financial Officers etc can be held directly responsible for safety breaches.
 Ensuring that you have in place appropriate consultative arrangement for all workers (your current health and safety management arrangements may be able to be adapted to reflect the consultative arrangements required by the model WHS laws.). The legislation has placed great importance on the consultative process and again, records of the respective consultative processes need to be maintained and kept as evidence that the process does take place.
All this may seem daunting, but with a little help from
the experienced staff at DP Safety Services,
the transition from the old to the new, can be a reasonably painless process.