CSG Posts
There was a lot of interest in this very timely and fascinating presentation. As Helen said, the current job scene in OHS is HOT and, as it is likely to stabilise next year, now is the time to pursue new opportunities if that has been on your mind. It's a candidate's market!
It was heartening to hear that the pandemic has had one positive effect in that the reputation of OHS has been boosted, making it a great career choice.
Helen shared some interesting national statistics on recruiting that showed the most sought-after job categories. She also offered valuable advice to both potential candidates and organisations looking to fill roles.
Helen conducts a regular podcast series where she talks to CEOs about OHS, which you can learn more about at https://www.hoktalentsolutions.com.au/podcast-webinars/
If you are interested in OHS job opportunities a bit further afield, check out Nan Austin's presentation from July 2020 about her experiences in New Zealand: Safety shake-up across the Tasman, which you can access here (log in first)
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WorkSafe Victoria is running Health and Safety Month again this October and the theme is "You learn something new every day".
As a part of the activities, free 45-minute webinars on a variety of topics are being run via zoom, so you can attend from the comfort of your own home!
A few of the highlights are:
October 20: Prosecution case studies; The infringement notice scheme; Work-related violence in community care
October 21: Workplace mental health; Safety within the multicultural community
October 25: Organisational culture; Systems thinking
October 26: A new approach to manual handling training; Tools for HSRs: prevent and respond to workplace gender violence
October 27: Tips for remote and flexible working; Predicting psychological safety
October 28: New Regulations for dangerous goods storage and handling and for silica; Welding fumes
October 29: The importance of HSRs to business; Improving return-to-work outcomes for mental injuries
Further details on the speakers and topics, as well as registration for the webinars, are available on the WorkSafe website here: https://www.worksafe.vic.gov.au/events
We had a great turnout this month as David Caple proved once again what a popular speaker he is. We really appreciate his access to up-to-date research along with the practical advice he offers in dealing with emerging health and safety risks. Not to mention an element of interactivity: not even the constraints of zoom could hinder his exhortation to us to try out some of the postures under discussion!
While David's presentation focussed on hospitals, many of the issues and solutions could apply equally in other settings. One is the role of design in both creating and mitigating risks, a topic that was prominent in the discussion after the formal presentation. Another is the notion of broadening risk assessment to encompass Associated Non-Technical Skills (ANTS), such as situational awareness and communication.
It was interesting to ponder some of the developments that have arisen over the last 18 months. For instance, the restriction on family members being able to visit in hospitals has led to a reduction in occupational violence. Conversely, new deep cleaning protocols can create extra workload and harmful repetitive postures for cleaners.
David's annual "State of the Nation" address is always keenly anticipated and this iteration was no exception. His style and knowledge are always greatly appreciated.
David's presentation complements the one given by David Trembearth in April this year, Musculoskeletal issues – what’s new in risks and prevention, which you can access here (log in first)
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Early this year, long-time member Les Auld said farewell to Central Safety Group, as he has moved to Far North Queensland –lucky man!
Les has been a valued member since the early 1990s and also served as Vice President from 2012 to 2014.
I asked Les to share stories from his life in Health & Safety and I think many of us can identify with the path he followed.
During the mid-1960s, he was working in the Catering Branch accounting office of the Victorian Railways when they advertised for a safety officer. He decided to apply and was successful. From there he gained his first OHS qualification at South Melbourne Tech.
His main duty was dealing with PPE. Safety footwear was supplied free to employees, but a fair percentage was being returned as a bad fit. Therefore, Les and a colleague would roam the state in a van full of safety shoes & boots in all brands and sizes to assist employees obtain the best fit.
Les says: “On one occasion we were in a station office, fitting track men, and a shoe came flying across the room. We said, “What did you do that for?” The guy came back, “Well, if I can kick it off, it doesn’t fit.” That was a lesson well learnt.”
He was sent off to expand his knowledge, which included doing the ACTU Safety Rep course. This led to him being asked to conduct safety training for staff. While it put him well outside his comfort zone, he appreciated the experience.
The job entailed him visiting and liaising with management and staff at various locations, ranging from the cafés at Flinders St to canteens at rail workshops to the Mount Buffalo Chalet, which was run by the railways back then.
Les worked on the implementation of a catering module for country trains, which is still in use. At the same time he gained a qualification in food safety from William Angliss College.
Eventually he became a Senior Safety Officer in the Transport Operations Division and remained there until he accepted redundancy in 1988.
A month later he began work as a medical orderly with Melbourne Health, his first “blue collar” job, which naturally involved a lot of manual work. This included stints in Emergency, X-Ray and the burns unit. After sustaining a back injury 5 years later, he was redeployed as an Assistant Safety Officer, due to his prior experience.
Later on he became Safety and Fire Officer at Northwest Hospital near the zoo. One day, while conducting fire extinguisher training, he turned his attention to the fire blanket. He says: “We had a square metal pan with water and a small splash of petrol. The fire blanket was a bit old in the tooth and had a hole in it. We placed it over the lighted pan and it also burst into flames. I saw the irony of this!”
During this time Les was involved with presenting Safety Rep courses and laser safety courses, and he also formalised his own on-the-job training and initial education with a Diploma of OHS from RMIT.
Les worked on a number of projects, including contamination reduction in the Nuclear Medicine Dept and addressing manual handling issues in the Catheter Lab, where cumbersome monitors and heavy protective aprons posed risks.
When Les retired he did pro bono work for not-for-profit organisations during the period of OHS Act harmonisation. He maintained his membership of CSG, because he found the speakers informative and valuable, not to mention our great Christmas luncheons!
With amazing foresight, he left Melbourne in March 2020. We thank him most sincerely for his many years of loyalty to the group and wish him all the best for his new life up north.
Alison Hunt-Sturman took us through the full and detailed journey of how her team faced the challenges of COVID-19 during 2020. During the discussion afterwards, Alison suggested that perhaps she should have issued a trigger warning before her presentation, because it certainly brought back many memories for those present!
We could certainly identify with their experience that began with a naive thought that the situation would be short-lived and that their existing systems were able to keep everything under control. However, as the full impact began to unfold, it was clear that Alison's early warnings, which had been considered overdramatic by some at the time, were justified. As Alison outlined the many developments in the pandemic and the accompanying body of knowledge, it was quite starling to realise how much changed just in the short period between March and May.
One of the stand-outs for me was Alison's discussion about the challenge of boosting the workforce. There was not only the obvious need to replace clinical staff on furlough, but they needed to boost staff in other areas as well. One example was in the IT department to handle all the technological changes. Another big issue was in aged care, where the restriction on family members visiting had a huge impact, because these carers make such a big contribution to the daily workload.
While the current experience is looking more and more like a replay of 2020, the positive side is that practices that were developed last year, and are in a continual state of review, are now putting Alison and her team in good stead for dealing with it.
Alison's presentation complements the talk by Christina Rennick from St Vincents Hospital earlier this year, Hospital Safety during the Pandemic, which you can access here (log in first)
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The committee has begun to meet regularly under the direction of new President Nan Austin. Once a month we catch up in the days following the zoom presentation and discuss future speakers, our financials, membership, website resources and other topics to benefit and promote the organisation.
Financial members can access the minutes via Quicklinks in the footer on our Home page. Go to About Us - Meeting Minutes or click here (log in first). They are posted after they have been accepted at a subsequent meeting, so the first one there is for June 2021. It is your opportunity to see how we are working on your behalf. We welcome your feedback!
In other news, Adrian Glaubert has resigned from the committee as he has moved away from the sphere of health and safety and has secured a role as Head of Enterprise for a large retail operation. We wish him all the best and thank him for his valuable contributions over the last two years.
I recently attended an information session held by WorkSafe Victoria about the new infringement notices scheme. Held via zoom, the session was very informative and professionally presented and, with approximately 2,000 viewers, it was clearly important to business.
Infringement Notices (or on-the-spot fines) commence on 31 July 2021 and will be an additional tool to existing notices, such as improvement notices, prohibition notices and non-disturbance notices.
The notices will be issued by an Inspector to relevant persons who have obligations under the OHS legislation (employers, employees and self-employed persons). Some other key points:
As the session was only for an hour, not all viewer questions could be addressed, but here is some of the additional information that came from the Q&As:
More information, including the presentation, will be available on the WorkSafe website in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, check out what is there already:
https://www.worksafe.vic.gov.au/introducing-infringement-notices-workplace-safety-breaches
Keeping up-to-date with contractor management
Earlier this month CSG members LinkSafe alerted us to a webinar they are hosting on August 24, featuring Sue Bottrell on the topic of contractor safety management. Well, the webinar became fully booked within 30 minutes! If you missed out, don’t worry, they told me that they are hoping to do another later in the year, so we’ll let our mailing list know about that as soon as we know more.
Sue Bottrell is LinkSafe’s Legal Advisor and a leading expert in contractor safety management. You may remember her excellent video presentation during our CSG Talks short video series last year. She spoke about the legal implications arising from the tragic incident on the Eastern Freeway that resulted in the death of 4 Victorian Police officers. Of course that is being played out in the courts as we speak, so it’s timely to hear again what Sue had to say about the contractor management aspects of this incident. Her talk A very public tragedy – but who is really responsible? is available to members and non-members alike.
This was a very informative session that consolidated many of the issues we learned about throughout the last 18 months that affect vulnerable workers. Dominic highlighted a number of areas where the essential workforce was exposed to risks. In particular, he spoke about aged care, the quarantine frontline, supply chain and meatworks. In the case of the latter, while WorkSafe acted quickly to produce guidance, some of it was not practical and needed to be modified.
Dominic and his team have developed an extensive program to assist Health & Safety Representatives (HSRs) and workers, with resources that are readily available via two of their websites: www.covidsafeworkplace.org and www.ohsrep.org.au. Resources include checklists for auditing and free 2-hour training sesssions.
Dominic also spoke about those who worked from home and how the rush to implement this new way of working has resulted in its own challenges. In our December 2020 presentation by David Caple, he went into this issue in greater detail and you can access it here (log in first)
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There was a great turn-out for this presentation, even though some members were a bit shy to turn on their cameras! Nevertheless, all attendees were treated to an excellent and informative session.
The bulk of the presentation focused on human error, which typically accounts for 60-80% of incidents. However, Kate demonstrated that there are many aspects to this. For instance, it doesn't relate to operators alone; it could be human error on the part of a designer or the person who does a risk assessment, among others.
In relation to design, it is worth considering optical illusions and perception of information. This was illustrated brilliantly via an interactive section of the talk that showed us just how easy it is to misread visual information. One of the take-home messages for me was that human errors do not occur randomly; context is important.
If you would like learn more about V/Line's general approach to safety, Sylvia Hudson gave a detailed presentation in April 2016 about their updated management system Destination Zero (log in first)
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This was a fascinating presentation and quite an eye-opener for those of us who are technologically-challenged. While Central Safety Group has only recently joined the world of zoom, Gavin Kenny at Melbourne Water has spent the last 4 years implementing a whole range of innovative solutions to common health and safety issues.
Gavin covered the whole gamut: from the use of Virtual Reality technology when designing new plant, through the use of animation to bring the Confined Spaces compliance code to life and developing apps for workers and maintenance contractors to use in the field, to very low-tech ways to engage with the workforce. With the latter, one that caught my eye was an annual staff barbecue called "Whingefest".
Another feature is the conversion of many of their procedures into a digital format to make them less cumbersome and, therefore, easier to use. It is part of their philosophy to reduce safety clutter. This was also the topic of our October 2019 presentation by Dr David Provan, here, which is definitely worth checking out again (log in first to access it).
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There was a lot of interest in this topic and David gave attendees a lot to think about after his excellent presentation.
David was keen to point out that manual work is not a bad thing and that he is not against manual handling. In fact, current research indicates that it is not only physical factors that contribute to workplace musculoskeletal disorders, but other workplace factors as well. Therefore, one needs to look at how a task is "shaped". With appropriate design controls, manual tasks can be made much safer.
David busted a few myths about the reliance on conventional interventions. He confirmed what many of us have suspected for a long time, that training is not an effective prevention tool. There was certainly quite a bit of head-nodding at this point from attendees.
David alerted us to some useful resources, including Safe Work Australia's handbook on the principles of good work design.
Due to copyright reasons, we are not able to include the video David shared about a couple of the innovative design solutions he has implemented at Coles. You had to be there! Make sure you put the second Tuesday of the month into your diaries so that you don't miss out on our great presentations!
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This informative session provided fascinating insights into the experiences of St Vincent's Hospital during both waves of the coronavirus pandemic in Victoria. And the experiences of each wave could not have been more different.
During the first wave much of their time was spent making extensive preparations for what the pandemic may bring. While they had only one case of Covid-19, they had to deal with a degree of anticipatory anxiety among their staff as they came to grips with the quickly-developing knowledge about this novel coronavirus.
The second wave was a completely different story, where "the only constant thing was change". They developed many strategies to deal with all the new challenges, and then when staff infections increased, they needed to review their processes to keep everyone safe. Christina shared many of these strategies in detail.
Her presentation stimulated a lot of discussion and has inspired us to delve into related topics for future meetings. In particular, dealing with post trauma from these experiences.
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At Central Safety Group's AGM on the 9th February 2021, our President Alan Matthews (universally and affectionately known as Ollie) formally resigned from the position after being at the helm for an impressive 18 years. Ollie's career in OHS and association with CSG is extensive, making him one of the group's living treasures!
He commenced with Fairfield Plumbing in 1966, which became Pratt Safety Systems in 1974, where he was their sole technical adviser. The company specialised in safety eyewash units; safety showers; safe storing and dispensing of chemicals and flammable liquids, as well as manufacture of safety signs, including working with the authorities to develop HAZCHEM signage for vehicles and buildings. It was at this time that Ollie first started attending CSG meetings.
In 1986 Ollie commenced as the first OHS Manager with the now John Fawkner Private Hospital in Coburg. By 1991 he was OHS Manager for five hospitals and eventually became National OHS Auditor for Healthscope hospitals across Australia, a position he held until March 2015. After a brief break of 6 months, he joined the Ramsay Healthcare group looking after two hospitals part-time before retiring from work in July last year.
Ollie has many memories of CSG since he first attended meetings in 1974 and he offers an insight into the evolution of the group. Originally there were a number of safety groups that all had a connection with the Department of Labour and Industry (DLI), now Worksafe. Meetings were in a similar format to how they were conducted prior to the coronavirus pandemic, but the venues were many and varied. He recalls that meetings in 1974 were held at the Richmond football ground; later they took place in various hotels, including the Celtic Club, and the group even experimented having breakfast meetings at the North Melbourne football ground. Other venues were the Bryant and May match factory in Richmond, the Australian Ballet in Southbank and a number of meeting rooms in offices in the CBD. He also recalls that there was a period when CSG conducted annual Apprentice Seminars with guest speakers on safety-related topics.
In 2003 Ollie was elected President of CSG and in 2013 he was awarded Life Membership. He has overseen many changes within the composition of the Committee. While welcoming and encouraging the evolution of the group through the input of new Comittee members, he provided continuity and a steady and supportive presence along with a strong commitment to our values.
In addition to his illustrious career in OHS and long involvement with CSG, Ollie has packed in many other interests. In 2020 he retired, after 20 years as board member and 16 years as President, of the Riddell District Football and Netball League. He has umpired 2,038 matches and continues to play and umpire football in the AFL Masters competition. In 2019 he was inducte
d as a Legend in the Hall of Fame.
Ollie has been a volunteer fireman with the CFA and was the initial Unit Controller with the Craigieburn SES for 10 years. In between all of that, he is a painter of wonderfully quirky emu images.
We wish Ollie all the best in his retirement alongside Jan, his wife of 50 years, their three daughters and seven grandchildren. Family, golf, painting, travelling...he continues to enjoy a rich and fulfilling life, and we look forward to seeing his smiling face at future CSG meetings. Thank you, Ollie, for all you have done for Central Safety Group!
