OUR ORGANISATION
Work health and safety We put safety first in everything we do. A healthy and safe workplace that promotes staff wellbeing and a strong safety culture will help to achieve the vision of Safety and how we do business around here. To achieve this vision, Council adopted a three-year Work Health and Safety (WHS) Strategic Plan in 2018. This is aligned to the Community Strategic Plan and Operational Plan. This Plan identifies safety goals as: • developing a work health and safety management system that drives legislative compliance and operational efficiency • embedding a risk management program to identify and control work health and safety risks with a goal of eliminating workplace incidents, injuries, and illnesses • building consultative platforms to drive safety, accountability, innovation and collaboration • measuring safety performance to ensure clear safety goals and continual improvement • building a robust safety culture and leadership team that drives a safety-first mantra. Our Work Health and Safety Management System aligns with the AUS/NZ4801 framework, ensuring a riskbased approach and legislative compliance. Through collaboration and consultation, the workforce has learnt how to achieve sustainable change and effective processes and systems to minimise and control risks. Key policy and processes include a WHS policy and commitment, injury management and recover at work framework, individual WHS responsibilities and accountabilities for all staff, emergency management and preparedness, first aid management, consultation coordination and collaboration mechanisms, WHS issue resolution, confined space management, incident management and reporting, WHS objectives and statistical reporting, working alone guidelines, and confined space management. Key policies and processes for review in 2021 include contractor management, inspection and testing, hazardous substances, and chemical management, purchasing and design control.
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Georges River Council // Annual Report 2019/20
Following the review of the WHS Risk Management Program, we aligned the program with our Enterprise Risk Management Framework for complicity. This will move us towards a holistic approach to effectively identifying and controlling WHS risks while eliminating workplace incidents, injuries and illness.
Achievements • We updated the Injury Management and Recover at Work framework to comply with State Insurance Regulatory Authority guidelines, and rolled out procedures for WHS responsibilities and duty statements for all workers, managers and officers’ duty of care obligations. The new procedure is part of on-boarding new staff. • Our WHS Committee held 10 meetings in the reporting period, in line with the statutory obligations. • The WHS Committee endorsed the new WHS Guidelines for working in cold weather, during hot weather and in poor atmospheric conditions. • We began to draft a Safe Driver Policy to improve staff safety which will also reduce our insurance liability. • We introduced the new online Confined Spaces Register. • Safety Week was held in October 2019 with various safety awareness events including a safety innovation initiative where staff raised suggestions to mitigate workplace risks. Safety Week incorporated onsite health checks with external health professionals. • We adopted a Working from Home during COVID-19 Policy and checklist and processed 350 working from home requests. • We developed WHS Guidelines for interacting in the field (COVID-19) and interacting with customers in the workplace (COVID-19) to communicate infection control procedures. • We carried out risk assessments on the application of the public health orders prior to reopening Customer Service Centres, libraries, museum, community centres and halls. • We modified the online event booking system to include additional criteria and information in line with the public health requirements.
