Industrial Safety News - May&Jun 2014

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FIRST WORD>>Health

University research opens new avenues for cocaine addiction treatment

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cientists at the University of Canterbury have discovered that by chemically activating a receptor in the brain they can eliminate cravings for cocaine.

The discovery has just been published in the official journal of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (www.nature. com/npp/), a leading publication in psychiatry.

The receptor in question is the trace amine-associated receptor 1 and is found in certain areas that appear to be very sensitive to drugs.

Cocaine addiction remains at epidemic levels in the US and in some European countries, but therapies to treat this condition are still ineffective.

The Canterbury finding opens new avenues for the therapeutic treatment of cocaine addiction, says UC psychology researcher Dr Juan Canales.

“It remains to be seen whether

activation of this recently discovered receptor provides relief for other forms of addiction too, including alcohol, nicotine and even compulsive eating,” Dr Canales admits.

“This is something we are going to investigate in the near future.”

The market for cocaine in New Zealand is small and unpredictable, and fellow stimulant methamphetamine represents a much bigger problem.

Canterbury researchers have already conducted experiments to see if activation of the brain receptor is effective with methamphetamine.

So far the results indicate that activation of the trace amine receptor completely eliminates the self-administration of methamphetamine in rodents as it does for cocaine.

“We will publish the full results soon,” Dr Canales adds.

Cocaine and methamphetamine produce euphoric effects mainly through activation of a transmitter

named dopamine, which is important for motivation, pleasure and well-being.

The problem is that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine cause a particularly powerful surge of dopamine in the brain.

By releasing dopamine, drugs create a shortcut to get to the brain’s pleasure centres, Dr Canales explains. “Normally dopamine is released when we experience something really exciting – this is how the brain learns and changes our behaviour to produce those outcomes again,” he says.

Dopamine signals reward in certain situations but is also a teaching signal. “When cocaine and methamphetamine activate dopamine they fool the brain into thinking that they are really good, or better than anything experienced before but this is only an illusion.’’

The Canterbury research team led

by Dr Canales has discovered that

ACC taking new approach to injury prevention

ACC has updated its investment approach to injury prevention to ensure the best outcomes for New Zealanders

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he revised approach reflects current trends in claims information and a strong commitment to addressing Dr Megan McKenna - we improved customalso want to do everything er service and the we can to help prevent in- fact that people’s juries from happening in activities and needs the first place change over time.

ACC’s general manager of Injury Prevention, Dr Megan McKenna, says the change reflects ACC’s commitment to more effectively carry out one of its core roles: preventing New Zealanders from getting hurt. “Providing support for injured people is a huge part of what ACC does, but we also want to do everything we can to help prevent injuries from happening in the first place.”

ACC has begun evaluating all proposed injury prevention initiatives using a new investment model, which considers: • value of investment • execution effectiveness • strategic fit • benefit realisation timeframe.

“First and foremost, we’ll look at how likely it is that ideas and programmes we invest in will achieve successful results for people,” Dr McKenna explains. “We’ll also consider more carefully how the investment fits with our strategic priorities, and when the benefits of the investment will be realised.”

Prevention covers a range of issues, including some that are complex and take a long time to address – for example, programmes that raise awareness of sexual violence may initially lead to increased rather than decreased numbers of claims.

This is because the number of people currently reporting these crimes and seeking support from agencies such as ACC significantly under-represents the true extent of sexual violence in New Zealand.

“Obviously if more people can get support for injuries that’s a better outcome for people in need, so we can’t just measure the effectiveness of injury prevention initiatives in terms of reduced claims alone.”

Dr McKenna says ACC will also collaborate more closely with other government agencies, to coordinate and maximise resources more effectively to achieve the best results for New Zealanders.

“There are many issues that lead to injuries, such as family violence and sexual violence, which overlap traditional agency boundaries, so addressing them calls for a joint approach.”

Dr Juan Canales when the trace amine receptor is activated, cocaine is unable to release dopamine into the pleasure centres.

They have also found that, after abstinence from chronic cocaine exposure, cocaine seeking disappears when the trace amine receptor is activated, preventing relapse.

Dr Canales’ postgraduate students are also involved in other addiction projects and work with the Canterbury District Health Board as part of their research.

ACC is also developing a more sophisticated approach to analysing the information recorded on claims, to obtain better insights on how injuries happen. “This will help us focus on the areas that matter most,” Dr McKenna believes.

“We’ve identified seven key areas of injury that together contribute to the majority of high costs for New Zealanders.”

These areas are: • falls • road injuries • workplace injuries • treatment injuries • sport and recreational injuries • lifting, carrying and strain injuries • intentional harm.

Dr McKenna says the announced changes will go hand in hand with a renewed focus on how to better serve and reach ACC customers.

“ACC is committed to keeping New Zealanders safe and healthy, and investing in injury prevention activities that support that goal.”

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3

THIS ISSUE Features

than 50 human carginogens in Kiwi land. An expert panel studies ways

3 First Word – Cocaine addiction

workplaces

and means to keep our cyclists

treatment and a new ACC ap-

35-39 Management - Professor

safe while a Kiwi company gains

the plate and becomes part of the

proach to injury prevention.

Sidney Dekker says a change to

traction in Australia with its online

solution rather than the problem.

6-7 Injury – New study on long-

the negative approach to problem

driver training programme.

Quad bike victims are largely middle

term disability implications

solving in the workplace may be

Cover story – Farming Safety

aged or older Pakeha men who are

8-9 Christchurch – Fletchers and

the key to ensuring safety. Sei-

Vertical Horizonz make formal

men’s Zero Harm safety expert

safety training certificates available

Tom McDaniel suggests they key

and Worksafe steps up inspection

is accepting that people will make

of residential demolitions and

mistakes and setting up setting up

workplace sites.

systems to respond to them quickly what to do about it.

28 Fire Safety - Auckland Airport

to avoid escalation.

Industrial Fire Training Facility is

40-42 Forestry - Progress reports

about a lot more than aviation

on forestry safety include a an

safety.

award winning tree traversing

and injury toll.

Federated Farmers steps up to

10-21. This comprehensive report owner/managers or self employed. takes an in depth look at the second

Farm Angel returns promising trial most dangerous industry in New results in trails to determine how Zealand and finds out how quad big a role it can play in providing a bikes are used and misused – and solution to quad bike injuries.

Myths about quad bike safety are

NZISM graduate member Sandra dispelled.

30-31 Cranes - McLeod Cranes de- robot, the lessons from Finnish veloped an award winning new lift success in LATF, a reminder of the

Jackson examines the merits of turn-

Landcorp Farming trail blazes efing farmers into general managers. forts by the sector to come to grips Editor Geoff Picken opens his with quad bike problems and finds extensive report by talking to Work- that on some farms they are not Safe New Zealand manager for needed at all.

plan for the Crane Association after industry woes with a march on par- National Programmes – Support Comment liament and the addition of worker and Design Francois Barton about 10-11 NZISM graduate member a near miss incident. representatives on the ACC’s injury plans and the role of the 100 in- Sandra Jackson examines the merits 32-34 Hazmat – Workplace prevention programme. spectors and farm visits. of turning farmers into general carcinogens - Government gets The Quad safety Action Group is managers.

tough on lessening occupational

44-45 Transport - Progress reports

illness that results on workplace

on campaign for motorised scooter formed after a call from Coroner

exposure to carcinogens and the

safety and the call for universal

22-23 Ben Thompson of Hazel Brandt Shortland for the sector to Armstrong Law examines the cur-

Health research Council finds more

ESC in vehicles entering New Zea-

take the lead in reducing the death rent safety regime and compares

Editor Geoff Picken 0212 507 559 geoff@ mediasolutions.net.nz Sales manager Pam Brown 0274 790 691 pam@mediasolutions.net.nz

Managing partner Phil Pilbrow 027 564 7778 phil@mediasolutions.net.nz

Publisher Mike Bishara 027 564 7779 mike@mediasolutions.net.nz

Design & pre-press Jamie Laurie jlaurie@hayleymedia.com

Subscriptions mail@mediasolutions.net.nz Rates: $30 incl GST and postage for 5 issues, plus digital editions to five email addresses.

Overseas rates available on request.

Web development Neo Chen 021 507 318 neo@appsolutions.co.nz

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CONTENT PARTNERS it with proposals for the upcoming Health and safety Reform Bill , especially as it relates to farmers.

24-25 Risk Management managing director Tony Brownsett asks if your company’s alcohol and drug testing regime lines up with current thinking.

Editor Geoff Picken 35-37 Professor Sidney Dekker on remedies for says a change to the negative ap- safety issues in farming – pages proach to problem solving in the 12-23 workplace may be the key to ensur-

Sandra Jackson looks at farmers as managers – 10-11

Hazel Armstrong associate Ben Thompson on new Bill – 22-23

Risk Management MD Tony Brownsett on alcohol and drug testing – 24-25

Seimen’s Tom McDaniel says people make mistakes. Be prepared – 38-39

Responsible Care CEO Barry Dyer reacts to political posturing – 43

Mike Bishara is the publisher of Industrial Safety News

ing safety.

38-39 Seimen’s Zero Harm safety expert Tom McDaniel suggests they key is accepting that people will make mistakes and setting up setting up systems to respond to them quickly to avoid escalation.

43 Responsible Care chief executive Barry Dyer wants members to Professor Sidney wake up and join the initiative to Dekker bans pessimism in ensure safe transport of hazardous workplace - 35-37 material through the whole supply chain.

www.isn.co.nz Free access online to an interactive digital edition.

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5

INJURY

Long-term disability a prevalent problem for patients who survive injury

By Mark Wright

A large-scale longitudinal study of injury outcomes in New Zealand, coordinated by the University of Otago’s Injury Prevention Research Unit (IPRU), has highlighted how long-term disability is prevalent among people who survived injuries whether or not they were initially hospitalised for their injuries

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his is one of several important findings to emerge from the joint HRC and ACC-funded Prospective Outcomes of Injury Study (POIS). The study began recruiting 2856 injured participants in 2007 and followed their progress for up to two years.

Associate Professor Sarah Derrett, POIS Principal Investigator, says all POIS participants were seriously enough injured to be placed on ACC’s Entitlement Claims Database. “That means their injury was deemed likely to warrant a week or more off work or help with social and rehabilitation needs.

“So even though these people weren’t hospitalised, their injury was still of a severity that ACC believed that they may need those sorts of supports or earnings-related compensation.”

Recruitment of non-hospitalised injured participants is one of the strengths of the study, and of interest internationally, because most other studies have only been able to recruit injured participants via hospitals or emergency departments.

“The high prevalence of disability among the non-hospitalised is a surprising finding because internationally there is a commonly held belief that unless you are hospitalised the injury is minor and something you are likely to recov-

The POIS study group from left: Associate Professor Sarah Derrett; Dr Emma Wyeth; Professor Shanthi Ameratunga; Suzanne Wilson; Gabrielle Davie; Dr Rebecca Lilley; Professor John Langley; and Professor Brendan Hokowhitu (Absent Co-investigator Associate Professor Paul Hansen) er from quickly,” Professor Derrett says.

“Three months after injury 69 percent of POIS participants were experiencing moderate to severe pain, 48 percent high psychological distress, and 55 percent reduced participation in activities.”

Another strength of POIS is the high follow-up rate (80 percent to 12 months and 79 percent to 24 months). This is partly because

the assessment of experiences and portion of Maori (566 participants outcomes was undertaken by the or 20 percent of the cohort) to research team independently of the ensure a strong statistical base for injured participants’ no-fault insur- Maori specific analyses. er (ACC), and assurances from the “Maori were having similar to research team and ACC as to the slightly higher levels of probconfidentiality of participants’ data. lems three months after injury.

Professor Derrett says the POIS Two-thirds were in moderate to team, which includes two Maori severe pain; over half were in Laboratory Gas Sensor Solutions investigators (Doctor Your Emmalab, Wyeth psychological distress; half were exyour safety, OUR priority and Professor BrendanAnalox Hokowhitu), periencing problems with walking; can offer a wide range of fixed and portable gas detection systems to ensure the safety of your staff, visitors and of course your business. Our gas detectors help you comply with applicable your laboratory. deliberately recruitedwillaalsohigh proand half legislation were for experiencing some

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May/June • 2014

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INJURY sort of disability.”

They are now publishing research on longer-term outcomes with a recent paper looking at the factors associated with disability 24 months after injury. “We have found obesity, pre-existing disability, having two or more chronic conditions pre-injury, and experiencing problems accessing health care services were predictive of disability into the longer-term for both the hospitalised and non-hospitalised groups,” she says.

“Among the hospitalised group, Maori were 70 percent more likely to be disabled compared to non-Maori. So the POIS findings

are also indicating the need for further work to understand why some of these relationships exist.”

One-third of the POIS participants were injured in the workplace. Research headed by team member Doctor Rebecca Lilley found that those injured at work had a 37 percent higher risk of not being in paid employment compared with those injured outside work 12 months after injury.

Those injured at work were 35 percent more likely to have problems with mobility, a third more likely to have a disability, and 21 percent more likely to have anxiety or depression compared with those

injured outside the workplace.

“There has been a lot of media coverage on injury in the workplace recently. Our findings suggest that we need to do a lot more to understand what is driving those differences in terms of the greater likelihood of poorer outcomes for those injured at work rather than those injured outside work,” Professor Derrett says.

POIS has published 28 papers to date, including many in international journals, with others currently in press and more about to be submitted.

A list of publications from the study is available at: https://blogs.

otago.ac.nz/ipru/research/pois.

POIS is also contributing to a large international study looking at the longer-term outcomes of injury. The ‘Validating and Improving injury Burden Estimates (Injury-VIBES) Study’, funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, involves longitudinal studies from the UK, Netherlands, America, Australia, and New Zealand. It aims to provide valid estimates of the burden of nonfatal injury.

Mark Wright prepared this article for HRC News

POIS provides pointers for improvement

S

everal important findings that emerged from the POIS report highlight the scope of the long-term disability problem in New Zealand and signpost several areas where improvement is urgently needed.

Disability: Prevalent in the sub-acute phase and longer-term post-injury regardless of whether or not people were hospitalised as a consequence of their injury. Three months post-injury, the proportion of those hospitalised with considerable disability was 54 percent compared with 39 percent among the non-hospitalised; 24 months post-injury it was 13 percent in both groups. Common predictors of disability include: pre-injury disability; having two or more pre-injury chronic conditions pre-injury; pre-injury obesity; and experiencing trouble accessing health care services for their injury.

Pain and discomfort: Commonplace post-injury; 69 percent reported pain three months post-injury and 52 percent at 12 months post-injury. Factors predicting pain included being female; older age; inadequate household income; and reporting two or more pre-injury chronic conditions.

Socioeconomic outcomes: People in the same age-group who

had a stroke were compared with a matched sample of POIS participants (who had an injury) in PhD research undertaken by associate POIS investigator doctor Sue McAllister. The injured, entitled to earnings-related compensation and rehabilitative support via ACC, had lower odds of reporting inadequate household income and were more likely to have returned to work than those who had a stroke 12 months post-injury. Supports, via ACC, appear to prevent a spiral downwards into poverty and ill health.

Work after injury: By three months post-injury most (73 percent) of those who were working pre-injury were in paid employment.

Predictors of not being in paid work include low/unreported pre-injury income; financial insecurity; demanding physical work tasks; being in temporary employment; long work week schedules; obesity; perceiving the injury was a threat to their life at the time of the injury event; and self-reported hospitalisation.

Work-related and non-work-related injury: Twelve months after injury those who had been injured in the workplace were at increased risk of not being in paid work, having problems with mobility or anxiety/depression, and greater disability, compared with those who were injured in non-work settings.

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7

TRAINING>>Christchurch rebuild

Shaking up site safety in Christchurch rebuild Fletcher Construction has joined forces with Vertical Horizonz to make a formal safety training certificate available to contracting firms accredited to Canterbury’s residential earthquake repair programme

Electrical devices are one of the six most likely fatal risks in residential construction

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he company’s Earthquake Recovery (EQR) business unit has developed EQR National Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety (Workplace Safety) Level 3 and 4 courses, EQR Learning & Development Manager Grigor McDonald explains.

“There are currently six Level 3 courses up and running and Level 4 is being developed with Vertical Horizonz and will be rolled out and available to the contractors in June of this year,” he says.

Vertical Horizonz is delivering part of the course face to face and the remainder via its own online portal.

“Most of the assignments are accessible online – the course is designed to be achievable and relevant to an individual’s work environment,” Mr McDonald adds.

The Level 3 course consists of six one-day modules, which contractors attend for a day before returning in a week to do another day’s training that is augmented by the online assignments.

“This ensures that the contractors receive consistent training which doesn’t interfere with their dayto-day work,” Mr McDonald says.

“Each Level 3 course has about 10 students and the Level 4 course will have around 20 students, although the numbers vary due to content, structure and amount of online material.”

The programme was specifically designed to qualify and certify inwork builders – focusing on the six most-likely fatal risks in residential

8

May/June • 2014

construction: • Falls from height • Confined/restricted spaces • Electrical dangers • Motor vehicle risk • Personal safety • Asbestos exposure The programme provides enhanced training on the compliance requirements and responsibilities of the contractor’s work repairing earthquake damaged homes, detailing the importance of thorough job safety analysis and identification of appropriate controls for hazards.

“They will also know and can use the appropriate PPE for work on site with specific reference to these safe6 areas of focus,” Mr McDonald says, adding that more information about safe6 risks can be found on the joint EQC/Fletcher EQR website www.safe6.co.nz.

“Graduates can then progress their training to a Level 4 National Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety if they so wish.”

The current training evolved from a Level 3 pilot programme that was conducted in October 2013 to gain an understanding of potential need, the relevant market and appropriate content. “We have found it ideal in terms of content and extremely applicable to work underway in the Canterbury rebuild.

The primary aim was to provide a benefit contractors working for as part of the EQC’s Canterbury Home Repair programme which is the largest residential repair project of its kind.

Latest available figures show that accredited contractors have completed some 54,000 repairs worth $1.79 billion since Fletcher EQR was established in September 2010 “Our aim has been to not only add value with health and safety training but also provide them a strong base of safety education so when the residential repair work is completed they will be better off than when they came into the programme,” Mr McDonald says.

“This is a fixed term project so when we finish the last housing repair, Fletcher EQR won’t exist in its current state, but there is no reason at all why the training courses cannot be opened out and delivered to any organisation in the country that wants to do an Occupational Health and Safety course Level 3 or Level 4.”

The courses will run throughout this calendar year, after which individual subcontractors can go direct to Vertical Horizonz if they wish. “At this stage it is not being offered to other businesses that are involved in rebuild or repair programmes in the city – it’s a benefit for those working as part of the Canterbury Home Repair programme,” Mr McDonald adds.

He is happy to work with Vertical Horizonz in future. “They are a reputable training firm that has very good NZQA audit results,” Mr McDonald notes. “They are flexible, they have worked hard to understand our business and they are very keen to be part of the solution to help contractors and subcontractors work more safely. “ The current programme is the latest in a long line of joint ventures with Fletcher Construction, observes Vertical Horizonz Academic Manager Andrew Saunders.

“We’ve worked with Fletchers since 1998 and conducted a lot of short courses such as working at heights and in confined spaces,”

Safety training focuses on the six most likely fatal risks on a project says EQR Learning & Development Manager Grigor McDonald he says.

It has been a close relationship but this is the first “big programme” Vertical Horizonz has run for the company. “They identified six hazardous areas for their operation and we had to deliver a programme that not only covered those areas but also contributed to the National Certificate in Occupational Workplace Safety,” Mr Saunders explains.

“This meant we had to find and identify the correct units, modify the assessments so they were relevant and transcribe a lot of our learner guides onto an electronic support platform so that the contractors can review it online rather that spending time face to face.”

He is currently adapting the Level 4 NZQA course to suit Fletcher’s specific requirements. “Level 4 is very much a practical application of the safety principles,” Mr Saunders says. “Ideally, we would like to them to use their own materials but we’re actually using Fletchers health and safety documentation as templates.”

This is, however, merely the latest stage in Vertical Horizonz’s development. “We already provide a wide breadth of training but are now moving into first line management,” Mr Saunders says.

It’s all very well getting people to do health and safety training, he maintains, but the company is also doing more workplace training.

“We’re moving into professional development, which is a new division in our operations and one that we believe is going to be an invaluable area.”

TRAINING>>Christchurch rebuild

Increased demolitions highlight safety risk WorkSafe New Zealand is increasing its site inspections to ensure safety is a top priority as residential demolitions in Christchurch grow between now and December

W

orkSafe’s Canterbury Rebuild Health and Safety Programme Director Kathryn Heiler is concerned at the high hazard risk associated with demolition work.

“The identification and removal of asbestos is of particular concern to us,” she admits. “It is extremely hazardous to workers and can present health risks to homeowners

and the neighbouring community if not managed correctly.”

She says WorkSafe inspectors in Canterbury are seeing “too many properties” throughout the region being demolished before proper health and safety checks have been carried out.

“The use of mobile plant such as excavators and the requirement to work at height are also of con-

Proper precautions prevent pain

M

s Heiler’s warning provides a timely reminder of several basic safety procedures that should be implemented around every work site in the country and not just Canterbury.

Moving vehicles and equipment on construction sites in particular can be fatal if not used correctly and safely – common hazards include people and plant sharing the same site or route where there is uncontrolled entry to and from the site and people using and arranging mobile plant inappropriately.

The Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 requires the employer to identify hazards in the workplace and take all practicable

steps to eliminate it – if this is not possible they must take all practicable steps to isolate the hazard and if neither of these options is possible take all practicable steps to minimise the hazard.

Eliminating mobile plant hazards is unlikely to be an option on a construction site, so hazards must be isolated or minimised by implementing the following traffic control measures: • identify the hazards in consultation with mobile plant operators and workers before the mobile plant comes onto the construction site • develop a traffic management plan including control measures to suit the specific requirements

cern, and so we’ll be increasing the number of demolition site visits from our inspector team immediately.”

Ms Heiler says that the increase in the volume of demolition work presents a significant challenge for the demolition industry. “WorkSafe’s major concern is that we are still seeing far too many instances where asbestos is either not being identified accurately or not being safely removed and disposed of prior to demolition,” she notes.

“This is simply not acceptable.”

If asbestos-contaminated material has not been removed prior to demolition, it can contaminate the soil leaving long-term issues

for the site and surrounding area.

“WorkSafe remains committed to working with the construction industry to ensure that the last of the demolition work across the rebuild does not harm workers or cause adverse health effects in the community,” Ms Heiler adds.

She warns that the industry should expect to see more inspectors on site in the coming weeks and months. “Where we see unsafe work practices and breaches of the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 we will be prepared to stop the work and take enforcement action. This may include the issuing of notices, fines or even prosecution.”

of the construction site • These control measures include: • isolating vehicles and plant from the people working on the site • planning/scheduling work so that vehicles and pedestrians are not operating in the same area at the same time • minimising plant movement on site by locating loading areas close to storage areas • providing drive through access to minimise turning or reversing • establishing designated delivery and turning areas • using fences, barriers, barricades, safety rails, exclusion zones, etc. to separate pedestrians from mobile plant and vehicles • planning the direction of traffic movement to minimise plant

travel around the site • providing warning signs at all entrances and exits to the site • establishing speed limits on site • using audible reversing alarms, flashing lights and reversing cameras • using spotters or dedicated traffic controllers to manage traffic movement • restricting access to areas where mobile plant is operating • ensuring that workers wear high visibility clothing • provide instruction and training on the traffic control measures to all workers and visitors on site.

The layout of the site may change during the construction project so in order to remain effective.

www.isn.co.nz

9

FOCUS>>Farm safety – commment by Sandra Jackson

Turning farmers into general managers produces health and safety gains

By Sandra Jackson

A farmer can often work alone or in extreme weather conditions in possibly unique terrain. It can be cold and dark at the beginning of the workday as well as the end. Work days are often long. Having no control over the weather conditions in an industry that is reliant on the weather may add stress to the daily work of the farmer to be overcome. Health and safety is better comprehended as a good business practice, is logical, and ensures the wellbeing of people working on the farm. Plus, in the long-term it will be a money-saving strategy.

E

ffective management of resources can assist farmers but the weather can never be fully controlled. Couple this situation with high debts and financial concerns, and a farmer is at risk of depression and associated stresses from the unrelenting pressure to maintain the farm.

However, say the words “health and safety” and some of the farming community immediately respond with disdain. The associated controls and rules are viewed as a nuisance for what is considered to be just plain old common sense.

Health and safety regulations can be seen as a barrier to getting ahead.

One prevailing viewpoint is implementing health and safety rules onto the farm leads to extra costs. It has also been labelled as the symptom of the ‘nanny state’.

In addition, health and safety regulations are seen as a direct interference in the running of the farm and regulators incapable of fully understanding the daily pressures of the farm to produce and continually maintain output.

However, for health and safety regulations to be active and provide better outcomes a change in attitude is the first major step.

This is often the biggest obstacle

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May/June • 2014

Managing health and safety The new Health and Safety Bill is introducing the title of PCBU, which stands for the “Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking”. The farmer will be an employee as well as the PCBU. In addition, all contractors working on the farm will be considered to be workers and not independent.

As the PCBU, the farmer is required to set expectations for all workers and contractors and they will need to adhere to the health and safety policy set by the farm.

The general manager or managing director is the person in charge in most businesses. Reducing property damage and lost time due to injury is a high priority to these leaders. Risk management is paramount.

The main influence for this consideration is to reduce unnecessary losses and to prevent avoidable increases in cost. Risk management has the same importance for the farmer. Poor risk management can led to an injury that will slow down the farmer or worker. This can make it hard to run the farm successfully.

There are two main demographics most at risk on the farm. The first is migrant workers. This group will often have arrived from countries where there are poor standards, poor human rights and where rampant corruption can prevail. They may have seen first-hand – employers who do not care if they make it home safe at the end of the shift.

These workers might be reluctant to speak up and challenge poor

safety practices, either from cultural norms or fear of reprisals.

Therefore the farmer needs to be more vigilant in ensuring this group understands how to operate equipment, wear protective safety clothing and use safety equipment and devices correctly. The clever farmer will not expose the business to financial loss and risk of prosecution due to a worker being seriously injured or killed due to ignorance.

The second group at risk is a bit trickier to influence – the older Pakeha male. They have operated this way for years and do see not any good reasons to change. They are often very skilled and knowledgeable in the many aspects of operating the farm. However all it takes is one bad decision, possibly generated from a combination of complacency and rushing, for a serious event to occur.

Penalties for management failure Punitive measures are being put in place to ensure PCBU abide by the law. Leaders and managers need to be held to account to ensure safer working environments for all workers in New Zealand.

They hold the resources - they set the safety expectations and provide the direction to the whole business unit.

The current prosecution situation has three main categories of possible charges covered in broad terms in the current Health and Safety Act. The new Bill is introducing different levels of charges with different levels of fines. The fines along with possible imprisonment will apply to the corporate, the officer in charge or PCBU, and to individual workers.

Each violation of the Act will have charges and fines to be imposed.

The fines are much higher for a corporate than an individual but

nevertheless all three categories may receive a charge and possible prosecution. This change will provide the courts with better tools to impose penalties.

Controls help Currently the Health and Safety Act has three methods for controlling hazards that can cause serious harm - Eliminate, Isolate and Minimise.

There is some confusion with the Isolation requirement and this is removed in the new Bill. The new requirement for the PCBU is either eliminate the hazard from the farm or minimise the likelihood of harm.

This is far clearer in application and actual implementation on the farm.

Farmers must either remove the hazard, or take “reasonable steps to reduce the harm”. And they must have evidence and documentation that they have considered and applied the protections required for each type of hazard that could lead to serious harm.

In addition, the new Bill further ensures a worker cannot suggest they do not need to wear safety gear or use safety devices as they are taking the risk themselves. The new Health and Safety Bill has stronger provisions for workers to be penalised for wanton disregard and failure to follow instructions of safe behaviour and to use the safety equipment and devices. This does not remove the requirement from the farmer to ensure workers comply, but it does assist in dayto-day enforcement of good safe behaviours and conduct.

Behavioural and attitude transformations to safety are paramount when making huge changes.

Having a safe operating attitude is important. Nevertheless, a prominent feature in the summary reports from investigation findings into serious injuries or fatal

FOCUS>>Farm safety

accidents indicates equipment or processes involved were not fully designed for safety.

Equipment and processes It is evident from the number of severe injuries or deaths on farms that there is equipment and/or methods being used that lack safety considerations.

Examples include quad bikes that cannot handle the New Zealand terrain, and easily topple over leading to serious injuries or deaths; pontoons in effluent ponds that can be easily used as platforms and a worker falling into the pond, becoming trapped and then tragically drowning; cattle crates that are not designed to keep handlers at a safe distance to prevent harm from an unpredictable animal; tractors and equipment operated without sufficient guarding – the list goes on.

The design of processes and systems must be changed whenever possible. Engineering out unsafe practices or processes is a vital safety step. The new Health and Safety Bill has a substantial section for the new legal requirements for equipment and tool designers.

Safety aspects and considerations for designing, creating and building new products for the farm will be compulsory. The benefit is that we remove the safety risks at the

outset and this is good for business.

Hazardous substances The HSNO Act will become part of the new Health and Safety Bill.

Currently this regulation sits under the EPA. It can be a confusing document and this change will be beneficial as it will be easier to access and interpret. Hazardous substances can be the long-term silent killer of people in the workplace. In the last century chemicals of all sorts were seen as revolutionary and used widely. It is only in recent decades that we are seeing the consequences of this. Asbestos is an example of a substance once used widely, but many workers in both New Zealand and Australia are suffering devastating and long-lasting consequences from working with asbestos.

Regardless of how beneficial a chemical is on the farm the farmer must make sure he understands how to prevent himself and others being in harm’s way. Wear the protective clothing, use the protective equipment. Store chemicals correctly and have emergency plans in place. Ideally replace the hazardous item with another that is both biodegradable and harmless to people. Always look for the way to eliminate hazards on the farm and then do so if possible.

Change attitude Health and Safety regulation requires the farmer to provide a safe workplace and to prevent harm to employees whilst they are at work.

However, employees can be family members or workers that reside on the farm – either permanently or for seasonal work. As the workplace is also the home there is a need to understand that the same rules apply.

Home safety can often be poor for staff heavily involved in workplace safety – often the workplace safety culture is not taken into the home environment. Behaviours known to be totally unacceptable in the workplace are blatantly used in the home environment. One of the biggest challenges to the farmer is to understand that this complacency should not exist and to abolish it.

Changing behaviours will involve always considering risk before tackling daily activities. This thought process is also critical when planning one-off activities. Although it would be gloomy to continually consider a ‘worst case scenario’ this type of thinking goes a long way.

Stopping and then pausing before proceeding to take action has its advantages.

Taking time to consider what might be unsafe and hazardous is

good practice – for both farmers and their workers. Being a person who is ‘risk averse’ instead of a ‘risk taker’ is more practical in the long-term and makes for a good business practice for everyone involved.

Change the culture When implementing health and safety into businesses there is often reluctance. Changing the culture of the team is the most important step and with time significant workplace safety behavioural qualities will occur. Only an attitudinal change to health and safety rules and the positive outcomes it can bring to farm operations will make any great difference.

One important aspect to be considered is that farmers need to see themselves as the general managers that they are. Farmers need to manage so many aspects to run a good productive farm – financials, land management, animal husbandry, stock purchase, machinery maintenance, the list goes on.

Health and safety management is simply another part of running a successful business.

Sandra Jackson is a Graduate Member of the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management (NZISM)

www.isn.co.nz

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FOCUS>>Farm safety

850 EVERY

YEAR

PEOPLE ARE

INJURED ON FARMS RIDING

QUAD BIKES.

FIVE DIE. QUAD BIKE INJURIES CAN BE PREVENTED – THEY AREN’T PART OF THE JOB. Life on the farm can often be idyllic – but statistics 1 2 3 4 clearly show that it can also be downright dangerous Riders must be trained/experienced enough to do the job

Choose the right vehicle for the job

Always wear a helmet

Don’t let kids ride adult quad bikes

Farmers who don’t follow these safety steps risk penalties under the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 if someone working on their farm is seriously injured or killed.

Farmers encouraged to sow safety seeds Agriculture is second only to forestry in the number of workplace fatalities each year, with farm vehicles in general and quad bikes in particular proving problematic

O

ften marketed as a farmer’s best friend, quads are involved in 28 percent of all farm-related deaths, claim an average of five lives and cause some 850 injuries each year.

Alarming figures to be sure, but it’s surprising that they aren’t higher given that research has found that some 60 percent of farmers will lose control of their quad bike sometime in their working life – and about 30 farmers fall off a quad bike every day on average.

Little wonder, then, that the gov-

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May/June • 2014

ernment’s workplace health and safety regulator has made agriculture in general and quad bikes in particular one of its top four priorities, along with manufacturing, construction and forestry.

“We have been focusing on quad bike safety as a core priority for the last three years,” WorkSafe New Zealand manager – National Programmes Support & Design Francois Barton explains.

This has produced an approximate nine percent reduction in ACC claims for quad bike-related accidents, but there is still a lot to

be done in this and other areas.

“We’re currently in the process of building on the quad bike focus by looking at farm vehicle and machinery safety as well as a wider agricultural safety programme focusing on building awareness and engagement on the overall importance of health and safety on farms,” Mr Barton reveals.

On a day-to-day basis, this will see some 100 WorkSafe inspectors continuing to visit the thousands of farms throughout the country. “We visited 1400-1500 farms last year and will be looking at maintaining

that level of farm presence during the coming year.”

The WorkSafe inspectors conduct proactive workplace inspections but aren’t dedicated to any particular area. “Most of our inspectors are able to be deployed where we need them so we don’t have a dedicated agriculture inspectorate,” Mr Barton says. “What we want to get better at is making sure we send our inspectors to the farm types and regional areas where there is greater risk.”

All available data shows that dairy, beef and sheep are the critical product areas where there is more harm occurring. “That’s where we are going to focus our inspector re-

FOCUS>>Farm safety

“More immediately, both WorkSafe and farmers need to work on the immediate things that hurt people such as quad bikes and tractors, which between them account for about half of all farm fatalities.”

The Bay of Plenty has the highest number of severe agricultural injuries –Taranaki is a big dairying area but sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. “They are obviously doing something right in Taranaki… we are obviously keen to work it out,” says WorkSafe’s Francois Barton source, but it’s also where there is some capability for the sector itself to step and take some control of the problem.”

Injuries levels vary from area to area for reasons unknown. “The Bay of Plenty has the highest number of severe agricultural injuries – interestingly Taranaki sits at the opposite end of the spectrum,” Mr Barton observes.

The WorkSafe team doesn’t have a clear explanation for these statistics given that the dairy sector bears a high rate of the injury burden and Taranaki is a big dairying area.

“They are obviously doing something right in Taranaki but what it is we don’t know – though we are obviously keen to work it out.”

The answer could come from the closer relationships WorkSafe is building with other key players in the agriculture sector as it looks to develop wider promotional campaigns with trusted partners and industries.

Cooperation key This synergistic approach is vital given that agriculture is such a huge industry in New Zealand, extremely important to both the domestic and export economies and clearly a hazardous work environment.

“Almost 35 percent of all fatal claims occur in agriculture and there is a $64 million a year direct cost to the farming community, with 20,000 injuries a year from a claims standpoint,” Mr Barton notes. “It’s a sector that kills its young people and its old, which is quite unique, and it injures a lot of people in between – mainly men.”

That’s why it’s “very important” that the rural community take some ownership of the problem and start finding some solutions.

“We’re really clear that the people best positioned to understand how to make farms safe are farmers,” he insists. “We’re really keen to be working with those best placed to find the solution, which is farmers, farming reps and those involved in rural communities and agriculture.”

WorkSafe’s latest quad bike campaign has already helped build closer ties with such organisations as Landcorp, Federated Farmers, Rural Women, Dairy NZ, the Dairy Women’s Network, FarmSafe and Primary ITO over the past three years, resulting in a “marked shift in the level of engagement” in the agriculture sector.

“Federated Farmers certainly made a real step into taking some ownership of the issues as well as

some of the solutions, while Landcorp continues to demonstrate real leadership in this area,” Mr Barton notes.

Landcorp in particular is taking a proactive attitude towards tackling the farm safety problem (see story page 20). “They’re a big corporate farm and they have to deal with all the variable elements across the country so they are setting a really positive example and showing that these issues are resolvable and can be tackled practically,” Mr Barton believes. “They are demonstrating that it is possible – that it’s not all too hard.”

More immediately, he says, both WorkSafe and farmers need to work on the immediate things that hurt people such as quad bikes and tractors, which between them account for about half of all farm fatalities.

WorkSafe is out in the sector on a day-to-day basis, focusing on quad bikes and testing how well farmers are meeting their responsibilities. “Where we need to we will issue notices,” Mr Barton warns.

“Where there is a fatality or serious harm we will investigate and take action accordingly.”

The department has also been working over the past six months

with the industry and other stakeholders, developing 10 best practice guidelines designed to assist farmers in clarifying safety on farms – everything from tractor safety, health and safety systems and motorbikes to dairy sheds and a full range of other safety issues.

“We are going to be looking to promote those guidelines more heavily from the end of June,” Mr Barton advises. “We’re holding active conversations with Federated Farmers and other key players to identify how we can benefit from their channels and networks and how they can benefit from the opportunity to be seen to be stepping up to the safety issue.”

Forum focus Nationally, March saw WorkSafe host a quad bike safety forum that attracted some 40 participants from a wide cross-section of interested parties, including the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) rural community leaders, training organisations, quad bike manufacturers and farmer groups (see page 16).

“There was a really clear level of ownership among a wide range of stakeholders who didn’t want to see these machines cause more death and harm,” Mr Barton says.

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FOCUS>>Farm safety

A Taihape farmer pressed the accelerator too hard when trying to get his quadbike out of reverse and zoomed backwards over a four metre bluff.

He ended up unharmed on his back on the other side of the creek - the quadbike had rolled onto its side instead of flipping over because the Quadbar had stopped it moving further.

“We’re supporting the Quad Safety Support Group that was formed, although there is a clear commitment from those players that they need to be the ones driving the work.”

WorkSafe is providing the secretariat for the Quad Safety Support Group, which was due to hold its first meeting on 12 May. “My expectation is that there will be four industry leads to take work streams forward.”

The success of this initiative will be measured in due course, but recent technological solutions such as the innovative Farm Angel (see page 18) are already helping farmers make better and safer decisions.

“I think tools like Farm Angel have their place – the challenge is making sure that farmers understand that Farm Angel is not going to make a lot of difference if a farmer overloads a tractor and doesn’t wear a helmet,” Mr Barton says. “It’s exciting and positive to see innovative technology helping make people safer, but the ultimate answer is not one thing but a range of things.”

One of this “range of things” to make quad bikes safer is to change farmers’ tendency to add other equipment to the machine. “They work on the assumption that if the machine can handle it, it’s safe,” Mr Barton believes. “That’s not the case – once you start adding to the weight of the machines you start

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May/June • 2014

changing their safety parameters.”

The quad bike safety forum came to a clear consensus that standards need to be developed to advise farmers when they can add after-market attachments and how to make sure they are safe.

Another challenge is altering farmers’ perceptions that quad bikes are mini tractors. “Farmers need to make an active decision

notes, what can’t be measured can’t be managed.

“Farmers are very high users of research and science,” he observes.

“One really strong commitment to emerge from the recent group meeting was that we need to develop a health and safety system so that we can have far better understanding collectively of the safety of our farms.”

The CTU was also present at the recent quad bike safety forum and WorkSafe is holding discussions focusing on greater worker involvement to provide a stronger worker perspective on the entire farm safety problem.

There are clearly issues with migrant farm labourers throughout the country and concern that as corporate farms grow, particularly in dairying, staff have more classic employment arrangements than a generation ago when farms were more of a family affair.

“Really understanding workers’ rights and making the workplace safe is obviously an important element and one that probably historically we have overlooked,” Mr Barton concedes. “We’re

“Farmers need to start thinking on an active, day-to-day level before making investment decisions. “ about selecting the right tool for the job when they know what they are going to be doing for the day,” Mr Barton says. “For example, quad bikes are probably not the right vehicle for the job when it comes to carrying huge volumes from A to B.” Similarly, farmers need to start thinking on an active, day-to-day level before making investment decisions. “They need to ask themselves what they will be doing on the farm and what are the most important tasks they need to address – is a quad going to do it or is a two wheeler and a side by side or a light ute going to be better suited?”

Information important WorkSafe is working to provide farmers with the necessary information to make these kinds of decisions because, as Mr Barton

therefore looking to work quite closely with CTU and other reps as appropriate.”

The success of these diverse farm safety initiatives and programmes can and will be measured in a variety of ways, including impact measures. “We know, for example, helmet sales have more than doubled since we started the quad bike programme,” Mr Barton says.

Helmet happy Farm surveys have shown that reported use of helmets is up, with a statistically significant increase between 2010 and 2013 in the number of farmers who reported that “all” or “some” quad bike riders on the farm wore helmets.

Ten percent of farmers in 2010 indicated quad bike riders wore helmets and this trebled to 31 percent in 2013, while 47 percent of

farmers in 2013 indicated all or some riders wore helmets – more than double the 20 percent recorded in 2010.

“We’re confident we’ve had modest success but probably not as much as we would want as fatalities remain a concern,” Mr Barton admits. “It has underlined the fact that we need to be doing more, working more broadly and more deeply with the industry.”

To this end, WorkSafe is currently undertaking market research programmes that will provide behavioural baselines and will also seek to monitor shifts and improvements in farmers’ attitudes and beliefs to reduce the 20,000 injury claims a year and the average 17 farmers killed a year.

“We are also conducting market research in other sectors so we can compare and contrast across forestry, manufacturing, construction and agriculture,” Mr Barton adds.

“This will help us to better target and formulate our communications with the sector as well as giving us something to monitor against.”

Ultimately, WorkSafe is taking its lead from other successful behavioural safety campaigns such as road safety and clean water on farms and accepting that a sustained, steady approach is needed to address the issue.

“We’re not starting a programme that we envisage being over in 12 months,” Mr Barton insists. “The programme we are developing at the moment has a multiple-year time frame with constant monitoring – if something isn’t working we want it to fail fast so we can replace it with something else.”

The key message, he maintains, is that farm safety is, and will continue to be, a top priority for WorkSafe. “The initial quad bike campaign is coming to the end of its three years,” Mr Barton concludes.

“We’re not going to stop it but rather build on that effort and grow our activity over time by focusing on farm vehicle and machinery safety while developing a wider agricultural safety programme that will help reduce the industry’s death and injury toll.”

137 farms, 376,000 hectares, 1,600,000 stock units. But our most important asset of all, is our staff. Every single one of them works long and hard to make Landcorp this country’s leading agribusiness.

In return, we are 100% committed to an ever-growing, ever-improving Health and Safety programme. And it’s safe to say we always will be.

FOCUS>>Farm safety

Coroner’s call spurs action summit A new national group has been formed to advance safe use of quad bikes in New Zealand’s rural industries

T

he Quad Safety Action Group was developed from an industry-wide forum recently hosted by the workplace health and safety regulator, WorkSafe New Zealand.

WorkSafe NZ called the forum in response to the recommendations of Northland Coroner Brandt Shortland, who last year held a joint inquest into five quad bike deaths in the farming sector.

Coroner Shortland sought expert submissions on quad bike safety from a wide variety of groups, including the regulator, manufacturers and users, before making several significant recommendations that covered a wide spectrum of specific issues and recognised the vital role the machines play on New Zealand farms.

His most significant finding was that the sector has to take the lead in reducing the death and injury

toll, which drove the regulator to set up the forum that led to the formation of the action group.

WorkSafe NZ’s National Programmes Manager Francois Barton says there was considerable maturity shown by the forum in agreeing to set up the action group to try and reduce the current quad bike injury toll, which currently sees an average five people killed every year.

“There were groups around that table who have very specific issues and agendas about quad bike use, but the encouraging outcome was that they were put to one side in the interests of the health and safety of the users.”

Supported by WorkSafe NZ and including sector leaders representing farmers, community groups, workers, manufacturers and dealers, trainers and researchers, the action group has a clear mandate

and the means to help farmers make better decisions around their farms that could ultimately save their lives.

The Quad Safety Action Group is charged with coming up with farmer-focused responses around: • clearer standards for the development of after-market attachments (e.g. spray tanks, quad trailers and roll over protection devices) • development of supporting information and activities to better support farmers selecting the right vehicle for the job • establishing an industry driven health and safety information system so that there is clear evidence and understanding of safety issues confronting the sector • better and more consistent quadbike training.

It was a natural step for WorkSafe NZ to bring the sector together to

Having seen demand diminish for the saddles his previous company manufactured, as farmers converted from horses to quad bikes during the 1980s and 1990s, Vernon Suckling started a new business supplying accessories for quad bikes and UTVs. The range includes the Quad-Pod – still selling in essentially its original form, more than 20 years after it was designed and patented by Mr Suckling’s Dargaville-based Ag-Tech Industries. Ag-Tech’s ATV Lifeguard is based on the Roman arc concept and consists of 60 nylon segments held together by two inner fibre cables, which makes it flexible and yielding rather than solid and rigid. It has the ability to flex or deflect around a rider’s body, limbs or head, in the event of a rollover, while also having the strength to hold an upturned quad bike off the ground, providing space to help prevent the rider from being crushed.

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May/June • 2014

proactively address the coroner’s recommendations, Mr Barton says.

“We had more than 40 representatives around the table all dedicated to identifying practical actions,” he notes.

WorkSafe NZ has run a quad safety campaign for the past three years. “While we’ve seen some positive changes, like an increase in helmet sales and a nine percent reduction in serious harm injuries, as the regulator we can only do so much to change people’s attitudes and behaviours,” Mr Barton concedes. “The forum and now the action group are testament to the farming community’s acceptance that it must come up with real and sustainable solutions for the safe use of quad bikes.

Key to this was the forum’s support of Coroner Shortland’s recommendations and the universal endorsement by participants (which included farmers, manufacturers, national associations, workers, researchers and the regulator) of the four key safety messages from his report: • riders must be trained and experienced enough to do the job • choose the right vehicle for the job • always wear a helmet • don’t let kids ride adult quad bikes.

The forum also agreed the inclusion of a message regarding effective maintenance, Mr Barton adds. “These machines cause serious workplace injuries and deaths.

That has a huge flow on effect on families and communities, and WorkSafe NZ is delighted the forum recognised that a proactive approach rather than the threat of enforcement and prosecution will achieve the sustainable change we all seek,” he says.

“Quads don’t discriminate – they kill the young, the old and the experienced – but the real tragedy behind these figures is that most of these deaths are completely preventable and I am confident the action group will help achieve a step-change.”

FOCUS>>Farm safety

Federated Farmers facing farm safety facts There are some encouraging signs good progress is being made on farm safety, according to Federated Farmers health and safety spokesperson Jeanette Maxwell

O

ne death was recorded in the agriculture and horticulture over last Christmas/ New Year compared to four over the same period in 2010/11, which Ms Maxwell admits was a bad year for the industry.

“Agriculture/horticulture recorded 19 occupational deaths in that year but since then the number has fallen with 17 deaths in 2011,

14 in 2012 and 12 last year,” she notes. “Every death is a tragedy but at least the trajectory is heading in the right direction.”

Another barometer is ACC records, which include a wider range of fatalities than Worksafe NZ. “ACC had 31 active new fatal claims in 2008/9 but that had fallen to 19 in 2012/13,” she says.

“Again, it’s sad to see numbers

like this but they also tell me that farmers are heeding the call to take workplace safety seriously.”

Ms Maxwell adds that Worksafe NZ inspectors have legal powers to covertly monitor farmers’ activities. “We’ve had a foretaste of this with its ongoing cycle helmet campaign,” she says.

Her message for farmers is to be aware that they are one of Worksafe NZ’s five target groups. “It is best to have polices and procedures in place, which ensures your farm business keeps one step ahead,” she maintains.

Federated Farmers can help, having developed an Occupational Health and Safety Policy as a practical response to the 2010 spike in occupational deaths. “This provides practical information and advice in plain English, which helps farm employers meet their duties and responsibilities under the Health and

Federated Farmers made a real step into taking some ownership of the issues as well as some of the solutions Safety Act 1992.”

The farm-specific manual contains useful tools because evidence of compliance will help to ring fence a farmer’s exposure should the worst happen. “That said, ‘evidence’ means safety must become central to how your farm business operates,” Ms Maxwell adds.

The HSE Act takes a preventative approach, which means it’s on the farmer to proactively seek out, identify and anticipate possible hazards or face penalties starting at $50,000 if obligations are knowingly breached.

“Having a proper plan like Federated Farmers Occupational Health and Safety Policy is a good place to start because the Worksafe NZ inspectors cometh,” Ms Maxwell concludes. “Not taking workplace safety seriously is like entering winter with insufficient feed.”

www.isn.co.nz

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FOCUS>>Farm safety

Past campaign spotlights quad bike quandary

S

afety campaigns do work in raising awareness, clarifying issues and changing quad bike rider behaviour as a 2009 campaign by WorkSafe NZ forerunner the Department of Labour clearly shows.

Victims were largely middle-aged or older Pakeha men, who were farm owner/managers or self-employed. Most were untrained in quad bike use, but had many years of experience in farm work and riding quad bikes, although around one-in-ten had no experience of working on farms.

In contrast to the older victims, younger victims (aged 15-44

years) had more experience riding quad bikes than farming.

The quad bike accident victim was usually the rider of the bike.

At the time of the accident, a large proportion of the quad bikes was towing an implement, which is a potential hazard.

In contrast, only a small proportion was carrying a load, also a potential hazard. In addition, a small proportion had a roll-over protection device fitted, and it is unclear whether this was a hazard.

Accident victims were usually at work on the farm and using the quad bike for work purposes.

Respondents working at the time of the accident used quad bikes more often than respondents not working, so had a higher exposure to the risks associated with quad bike use.

It was possible to consider the respondents as two groups: those ‘working’ and those ‘not working’ at the time of the accident, where ‘working’ can be seen as a proxy for other factors such as experience and type of use of the quad bike.

Behaviour changes Overall, it appears that at least half the respondent made chang-

Kiwi creativity shows way to improve farm vehicle safety Blue Wing Honda has engaged Blackhawk Tracking Systems to develop a worldfirst solution to help improve ATV safety with a focus on driver behaviour and communication

C

alled Farm Angel, the Blackhawk technology is being trialled by Landcorp Farming, which is committed to improving safety on farms and will install the equipment on around 60 ATV and Side-by-Side vehicles.

“This is a unique solution which will enable rider/driver behaviour to be monitored, modified and improved,” says Blue Wing Honda general manager Alan Petrie. “The aim is to save lives before they need to be saved, but should an accident unfortunately occur, Farm Angel will also assist in the recovery of seriously injured or trapped riders.”

He says Blue Wing Honda has been

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May/June • 2014

working with Blackhawk “for some time” to create the right system that not only helps the ATV rider get out of trouble quickly by sending an immediate automated alert to a first response Call Centre, but also improves on-farm communication while giving peace of mind to farmers, their employees and their families.

“Initial feedback is that it’s an idea that fulfils several needs so we are proceeding to an on-farm trial with Landcorp,” Mr Petrie adds.

His enthusiasm is echoed by Blackhawk chief executive Andrew Radcliffe. “We believe this is a world-leading initiative with multiple safety features that will lead to significant improvements in driver behaviour, enhance on-farm communication and, ultimately, help reduce accidents.”

Providing 100 percent on-farm coverage, Farm Angel includes a GPS/ satellite tracking device, route tracking and monitoring to benchmark rider/driver behaviour, including acceleration, speed and tilting.

Alerts are automatically activated if pre-set limits are breached and hours

of use can also be tracked and signals given when servicing is required.

The device also determines who can operate an ATV with a key-fob or medical wristband that activates the ignition, thus stopping use by underage or non-trained riders.

If the ATV rolls or tips right over, emergency services or a pre-determined number will be automatically alerted, enabling a fast automated response to any remote location to attend to a trapped or injured rider.

Drivers can also manually send requests for assistance via the fob or smartphone application.

“All the information gathered can be displayed to the farm manager through an online or mobile interface, helping with rider behaviour and safety plus the security, servicing and overall management of the quad bike,” says Mr Radcliffe.

The Farm Angel initiative could help cut ACC claims for accidents involving ATVs including quad bikes, farm bikes, four-wheelers and three-wheelers which amounted to more than $3.2 million in 2013.

The vehicles are involved in about 850 on-farm injuries and five deaths

es and were acting more safely in their use of quad bikes following the accident.

Changes included a decrease in the carrying of passengers and, consistent with other research, an increase in the use of helmets.

Respondents also reported a reduction in the frequency of riding quad bikes.

Interestingly, one of the department’s quad bike safety campaign messages was ‘Choose the right vehicle for the job’. So, the fact that some respondents reported using quad bikes less may reflect the fact that they were now choosing vehicles better suited to the task than quad bikes.

Almost half the respondents reported other behavioural changes following the accident, such as a year, with coroners repeatedly calling for easy-to-activate alarms or communications systems to be introduced. “We’ve taken that message on board and with Blackhawk, believe we have created an ideal solution,” says Mr Petrie.

He would eventually like to see Farm Angel standard on every new ATV and available to install on any farm vehicle, similar to when seat belts became compulsory for all passengers in the 1980s. “But we do still strongly recommend ATV drivers undertake approved training courses, wear helmets at all times and follow all other manufacturers’ guidelines.”

Landcorp chief executive Steven Carden says that Landcorp has been proactive in working to reduce the number and impact of accidents involving ‘quads’ over the last two years. “We see Farm Angel as being a great extension to our stability study, which we used to inform riders of the capabilities of their vehicles, especially when towing or carrying loads,” he adds.

“We also acknowledge that rider behaviour is a major cause of accidents involving the quad, and see Farm Angel as a potentially powerful tool in identifying areas where further rider education is required.”

Once the trial is complete, Blue Wing Honda and Blackhawk plan to market Farm Angel throughout New Zealand and internationally.

FOCUS >>Farm safety increased awareness of their surroundings and speed, and taking more care generally.

A few had stopped riding quad bikes altogether (although it is not clear from the survey if their injury now prevented them from doing so). However, two-thirds were still not wearing helmets even after the accident.

Training About one-fifth of respondents had received some formal training in quad bike use, a similar proportion had received informal training, and the remainder were self-taught.

Nearly all who received formal training had done so before the accident, and only one percent of all respondents attended training

following the accident.

Respondents’ reasons for undertaking formal training were mainly to comply with their employers’ instructions rather than for safety reasons. Younger respondents (aged 15-44 years) were more likely to have attended training than older respondents (aged 45 years and over). About two-thirds of trained respondents reported making changes after receiving training, with most reporting they were more cautious.

Respondents who had received training before the accident were slightly more amenable to making changes following the accident, although it is possible that other factors such as working, experience, and age encouraged the behaviour changes.

Quad bike safety campaign awareness Half the respondents were aware of the department’s quad bike safety campaign, a similar proportion was aware of the message advocating the use of helmets and a quarter were aware of the message about choosing the right vehicle for the job. Awareness was higher among respondents working at the time of the accident than respondents not working at the time of the accident.

Overall, the safety campaign seemed to have influenced helmet use among quad bike riders and improved awareness of key messages about the safe use of quad bikes, thus laying a firm foundation for ongoing educational campaigns.

Helmets and hi-vis jackets are compulsory for Landcorp quad bike riders

Making mock of motoring myths

W

orkSafe NZ is working hard to shatter several common misconceptions and myths held by farmers and other riders about quad bike safety.

Myth: Accidents only happen at high speeds Farm quad bikes weigh approximately 270 kilograms on average, leaving a rider with little chance of escape if the bike tips over.

While many consider excessive speed is responsible for most quad bike accidents, in reality this is only one factor that can lead to injury or death.

“It’s certainly important that quad bike riders travel the appropriate speed to the terrain they’re riding on, however farmers must realise they can be seriously hurt or killed even while riding a quad bike slowly,” says WorkSafe New Zealand Manager – National Programmes Support & Design Francois Barton.

“The high centre of gravity on a quad bike means that accidents can happen even when travelling at walking pace, if

you were to unbalance the bike, or travel over an uneven surface.”

WorkSafe NZ encourages all quad bike riders to adopt a ‘speed-appropriate’ riding style which means getting into the habit of assessing the terrain before choosing to ride over it, going another way if it looks too rough or turning around and using a more appropriate means to complete the task Quad bike riders should also set appropriate speed limits on different terrain or areas of the farm and as they relate to different weather and condition, leaving themselves plenty of time to complete tasks rather than rushing and risking and accident.

Myth: Accidents only happen on hills Farmers who roll their quad bike on a hill often have the advantage of gravity and are able to move away from the quad bike more easily, than those who roll the bikes on the flat, where the bike will more often than not land on top of the rider.

“It is complete nonsense to say ‘it won’t happen to you on flat ground’ – sadly too many farmers have held this view and have been left seriously injured or dead,” says Mr Barton.

“Quad bikes have a high centre of gravity and therefore caution must be taken at all times, as the quad bike may become unstable due to sudden and dramatic shifts in the bike’s centre of gravity.

The quad bike safety guidelines state that “riders can easily lose control of quad bikes following a collision with an object, encountering unfavourable ground conditions, or as a result of towing trailers.”

Myth: I know how to ride a quad bike properly - I’ve been riding for years Statistics show that many of the 850 people injured and five who die on average each year riding quad bikes aren’t necessarily new or inexperienced riders.

Research also shows that having no formal training contributes to the severity of quad bike injuries while those that

have formal rider training are at a reduced risk of being killed on a quad bike.

WorkSafe NZ’s quad bike safety campaign has four key steps to reduce the injury and death toll: • always wear a helmet • never let kids ride adult quad bikes • choose the right vehicle for the job • riders should be trained or experienced enough to do the job.

The last step is just as crucial, says Mr Barton. “Where possible we would encourage farmers and their workers to go through a quad bike rider training course – this is the best way to ensure people learn the skills they need to ride safely,” he says.

Farmers can put their workers through a sample quad bike rider competency assessment checklist – the employer has a duty to ensure they are provided with the appropriate training if required and should keep records of these checklists to provide a record of training.

www.isn.co.nz

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FOCUS>>Farm safety

Landcorp shows the way to safe farming Leading New Zealand agribusiness Landcorp Farming Ltd has taken the farm safety message to heart with a series of initiatives that provide a sterling example for the rest of the country’s agriculture sector

Landcorp continues to demonstrate real leadership in this area

Horses have been reintroduced to some Landcorp farms because they are often more suitable for the job at hand than quad bikes

L

andcorp began to get concerned about quad bike safety last year and started taking positive steps to rectify the situation, both within its own business and by getting involved with the quad bike safety forum.

The company was spurred into action by a number of quad bike accidents in recent years, including 11 last year alone and a fatal incident some years ago when a young woman employee on one of the group’s West Coast properties was killed in a quad bike rollover.

“This was the one and only fatality in Landcorp’s history and it absolutely rocked the entire organisation,” Landcorp Farming General Manager – People and Capability, Anna Cassels-Brown recalls.

“It was extraordinary because she was on relatively flat land, going at low speed and doing nothing dangerous – in fact, I believe she had just literally come from a session with her manager on quad bike safety.”

Landcorp already had quad bike training in place but immediately implemented very strict safety rules for all the 600 staff on the com-

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pany’s 137 sheep, beef, deer and dairy operations located throughout New Zealand from Kaitia to Te Anau.

“The rules revolved around wearing the right equipment - helmets, hi-vis jackets, proper footwear, absolutely no passengers and speed limits pegged to the crash limits of the helmets,” Ms Cassels-Brown explains.

There was also sustained “significant” education about the operating limits of quad bikes, the use of trailers and ensuring that the farm had the right equipment for the job.

“If there’s a job a person needs to do and the terrain doesn’t lend itself to a quad bike being the ideal solution, then we made sure that the right solution is there – which might a small tractor, two wheeler, side by side or a range of things.”

Most of Landcorp’s properties boast quad bikes but the company hasn’t gone to the extreme of banning them entirely – instead it looked at the farms and assessed the correct transportation for the terrain.

Cutting quads “For example, when we took over the management of Shanghai Pengxin’s dairy farms in Taupo we saw they were on flat terrain, well raced and well tracked and there was no need for quads or any sort of off-road vehicle,” Ms Cassels-Brown explains. “So we don’t have a single quad on any of those 13 dairy farms in the central plateau.”

Interestingly, there was a “hue and cry” when Landcorp management announced that there were going to be no quads on the Shanghai Pengxin properties.

“Now the staff don’t miss them at all because they’ve realised they don’t need them.”

All in all, she says, it’s simply a matter of assessing the specific requirements of each individual property, which some cases is a horse – despite the fact that ACC recorded some 1300 horse-related injuries last year compared to 764 all-terrain vehicle accidents.

However, Landcorp also realised that having “great systems” only goes so far when it comes to maintaining the highest safety

standards. “We really needed to get into people’s heads and start creating a desire to behave safely, start raising awareness and start having honest conversations about the entire safety issue,” Ms Cassels-Brown says.

Health & Safety Quality Manager Cushla Beale accordingly developed the “Play It Safe” programme, a vital element of which was a high-profile spokesperson to whom farmers could relate and who could talk to them in their own language.

Tough talker Former All Black Richard Loe appealed as the perfect candidate.

“He’s a farmer, he’s got a serious reputation as a tough guy and a straight talker - he was the ideal guy to front our campaign,” Ms Cassels-Brown insists.

“Not only have we shot a video involving him and Antonia Prebble, which every staff member has seen and is going to be used as part of our new staff induction programme, Richard came along on the national roadshow with the executive team.”

FOCUS>> Farm safety Chief Executive Steven Carden, General Manager - Farm Operations Graeme Mulligan and other members of the leadership team toured Landcorp’s properties beginning in March in Hanmer and had “really honest” conversations with staff about safety in general and the new campaign in particular. “How are we doing with regard to safety, did staff really feel safe on our farms, what were those farms doing right that hadn’t had a safety incident in the last six months – those were the types of questions we asked staff.”

The leadership team spent some three months on the road covering the length and breadth of the country, holding 15 sessions and learning some difficult truths along the way in what Ms Cassels-Brown admits was a “cathartic” process.

“Staff had the sense that safety had been seen as a compliance issue and an imposition by Head Office and that we simply wanted more productivity,” she says. “We stressed that we wanted them to work safely every day and that productivity and profitability would follow naturally.”

This led into conversations about the quality of safety training Landcorp was offering, the systems

staff were using, whether they were being properly inducted and whether they understood the hazards. “This flushed out a whole lot of real baseline questions staff had wanted to ask but didn’t know who to ask or whether it was even OK to ask.”

Simple slogans The new “Play it Safe” campaign that took a year to develop and kicked off in January in Waitangi focuses on simple messages such as having the courage to intervene if someone sees an unsafe act, making sure near misses are discussed on the farm and watching out for workmates.

The campaign is, however, only the start of an ongoing safety programme and a whole raft of activities will be rolled out over the next two years to back up the core messages. “We’re revamping and reissuing our safety manual and going to develop some simple cardinal rules that are unequivocal and easy to remember,” Ms Cassels-Brown explains. “We’re going to continue to use Richard Loe in a variety of different ways as he has proved a very effective spokesperson.”

Other initiatives include rolling

out the innovative electronic Farm Angel quad bike safety tool and developing an online induction that prospective staff can view before they join Landcorp. “We’re going to start benchmarking against other industries and will join the Business Leaders Health & Safety Forum to participate in their benchmarking programme,” Ms Cassels-Brown adds. “We’re also going to be embedding safety in all our leadership development programmes as well.”

It is, in short, a complete overhaul of Landcorp safety training to make sure that it’s relevant and that staff can apply it directly on the farm. “We’re planning a small piece in the wellness area – one around mental health and the other around nutrition because a well-nourished mind and a well-nourished body are critical for safety,” Ms Cassels-Brown believes. “There’s also going be a very visible leadership team out on farms participating in toolbox talks and discussing safety.”

The initial focus in the first year of the campaign is in-house, although the Landcorp management team has set stiff targets. “We want to improve safety performance by 15 percent in the next financial year,

which begins in June,” Ms Cassels-Brown reveals.

Landcorp is concentrating on its own staff initially but also wants to be able to help improve the entire industry’s safety performance.

“WorkSafe NZ is a critical partner for us – we’re going to be working very closely with them and trying to leverage each other’s work,” Ms Cassels-Brown says. “We’re also going to partner with Dairy NZ around some wellness issues and generally make a wider contribution to the agricultural industry at large.”

“Play It Safe” will run for two years, at which time Ms Cassels-Brown is confident that Landcorp will be at “a different place” in terms of safety performance.

“We’ve got a long way to go – it will be a couple of years before I’m satisfied that we have made progress and then we will look to do something different.”

Ultimately, it’s all part and parcel of Landcorp’s ongoing commitment to farm safety. “We’ve recognised that if we keep doing the same things we’re going to keep getting the same results so we’re definitely going to do things differently,” Ms Cassels-Brown concludes.

www.isn.co.nz

21

F OO CMUMS E> N> Tx >x >x Lx a w b y B e n T h o m p s o n C

Big changes coming for all farm owners and workers

T

he current legal framework for health and safety in all workplaces – including farms – is the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 (‘the HASIE Act’).

However, the legislature is currently preparing a new legislative framework for workplace health and safety, which is intended to come into force on 1 April 2015.

The HASIE Act is focused mainly on employers and employees.

Whilst both employers and employees have duties under the HASIE Act, the primary duty-holders are employers.

Employer duties The main duties owed by employers are set out in section 6 of the HASIE Act. Employers must ‘take all practicable steps’ to: • provide/maintain a safe working environment for employees; • provide/maintain health and safety facilities for employees at work; • ensure that all plant used by employees is safe; • ensure that employees at work are not exposed to hazards arising from things either within the workplace, or things nearby the workplace which are under

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the employer’s control; • develop procedures to deal with emergencies.

Employers must systematically identify hazards to their employees at work, and clarify how serious those hazards are.

In the case of ‘significant hazards’ – i.e. hazards with the potential to cause 1) serious harm, 2) harm which would increase with increasing exposure to the hazard, or 3) harm that is not usually detectable until a significant time after exposure – the employer must: • take all practicable steps to eliminate the hazard; or • if the hazard remains in existence, take all practicable steps to isolate the hazard; or • if the hazard remains in existence and un-isolated, take all practicable steps to minimise the likelihood of the hazard causing harm. Minimisation will include the provision of personal protective equipment.

Section 13 of the of the HASIE Act sets out that employers must also take all practicable steps to ensure that all staff using plant/ dealing with substances are appropriately trained, or are supervised by somebody who is so trained.

All practicable steps The above summary shows that the concept of ‘all practicable steps’ is at the heart of an employer’s duties under the HASIE Act. But what does that phrase mean?

It means all steps that are reasonably practicable having regard to: • the nature/severity of the potential harm; • how much is known about both a) the likelihood of the hazard causing harm if all practicable steps are not taken, and b) the harm itself; • how much is known about the available means of achieving the particular result (e.g. hazard elimination/isolation/minimisation); and • the availability and cost of those means.

So, ‘all practicable steps’ does not mean all possible steps. What is a ‘practicable’ step will differ according to each situation, and particularly according to the likelihood and severity of the hazard under consideration.

Employee duties Section 19 of the HASIE Act requires all employees to take all practicable steps to ensure their own safety whilst at work, and

that no action or inaction of theirs causes harm to anyone else.

This duty is much more limited than that imposed upon employers. The steps that are practicable for an employee to undertake will be, in most cases, more circumscribed than the steps that are practicable for an employer to take.

Other duty-holders In addition to employers and employees, the HASIE Act also imposes duties upon: • persons who control places of work. Such people owe broad duties to others at, or in the vicinity of, the workplace. It does not matter that those others might not be employees of the person controlling the workplace.

• self-employed people, who must take all practicable steps to ensure that no action or inaction of theirs causes harm to anyone else.

• principals, who must take all practicable steps to ensure the safety of contractors/ sub-contractors, as well as the employees of contractors/ sub-contractors.

• people who sell or otherwise provide plant, who must take all practicable steps to ensure that the plant is safe for its intended use, or reasonably foreseeable use (this duty does not apply to second-hand plant, or plant sold on an ‘as is’ basis).

Penalties for breaches Speaking broadly, if a duty-holder fails to comply with his or duties relating to workplace health and safety that duty holder thereby commits an offence, and is liable on conviction to a fine of up to

COMMENT>>Law $250,000.

There are separate offences which apply when: • a duty-holder takes an action which is contrary to a provision of the Act, in the knowledge that the action is reasonably likely to cause serious harm to any person; or when • a duty-holder fails to take an action required of them by the Act, in the knowledge that this failure is reasonably likely to cause serious harm to any person.

A person guilty of such an offence is liable on conviction to imprisonment of up to two years and/or a fine of up to $500,000.

New legal regime In the aftermath of the Pike River tragedy and several subsequent reviews of New Zealand’s poor workplace health and safety record, a new legislative framework is being developed in the form of the Health and Safety Reform Bill (‘the Bill’). The key change proposed by the Bill is the broadening of the primary duty-holder category.

PCBU – the primary duty-holder Under the Act the primary duty to ensure workplace health and safety falls on a Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking (‘PCBU’).

Employers will fall within this designation, but they will not be the only ones.

This change will likely be important for those farm owners who do not personally take an active role in the operation of the farm. Even though such an owner may not employ farm workers (e.g. where a share-milker employs the worker, or where the owner contracts a shearing gang), if the owner is considered a PCBU then he or she will be a primary duty-holder in relation to those workers’ health and safety whilst on the job.

Importantly, the Bill envisages the simultaneous existence of multiple PCBUs, and therefore multiple primary duty-holders. Using one of the above examples, it is likely that both the farm owner and the share-milker would be PCBUs owing a primary duty to the

share-milker’s employee.

What is the primary duty?

PCBUs will have a broad duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of: • workers employed or engaged (or caused to be employed/engaged) by the PCBU; • workers whose work tasks are influenced or directed by the PCBU. A PCBU must also ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that the health and safety of other persons is not put at risk from work carried out as part of the conduct of the business or undertaking.

Depending on the nature of a PCBU’s business, their duties may extend even further. The Bill provides that PCBUs who design, manufacture, import or otherwise supply plant, substances or structures for use at a workplace will each owe duties to those who ultimately use/handle/store the product in the workplace.

‘Worker’ The Bill features a broad definition of the term ‘worker’. A ‘worker’ is a person who carries out work in any capacity for a PCBU, including an employee, contractor, sub-contractor, employees of a contractor/ sub-contractor, labour hire employees, outworkers, apprentices/ trainees, a person on a work trial, a volunteer, or a person of a prescribed class.

This is obviously a very broad definition. It is intended to encompass the whole gamut of relationships which are normally seen in modern workplaces. This is clearly relevant to the agricultural industry, where those working on the farm will not always be directly employed by the farm owner.

‘Reasonably practicable’ Under the Bill, the current standard of ‘all practicable steps’ will be replaced by a new standard: ‘reasonably practicable’. This is the standard which runs through all duties owed by PCBUs. The new standard is broadly similar to that in the current law. The key difference is that, under the

new law, the cost of eliminating or minimising a risk can only be considered after an assessment of the risk and the ways in which it might be eliminated or minimised.

Moreover, the wording of the Bill suggests that cost will only take preference where it is grossly disproportionate to the nature and extent of the risk.

However, both the current and the new standards allow for different duties to be owed by different PCBUs involved in one workplace.

Concern has been raised, for example, about farm owners being responsible for employees of third-party organisations who come onto the farm – e.g. linesmen. However, the farm owner will not be the only PCBU in this situation; obviously the employer of the linesman will also be a PCBU. Whilst the same standard of ‘reasonably practicable steps’ will apply to both PCBUs, this will mean different things in practice – i.e. what is reasonably practicable for the employer will not necessarily be what is reasonably practicable for the farm owner.

Other duty-holders: Officers Under the Bill, an ‘officer’ is a person holding certain senior positions within a PCBU (e.g. a director, a partner), or any ‘other person who makes decisions that affect the whole, or a substantial part, of the business of the PCBU (for example, the chief executive)’.

Officers of a PCBU will be required to exercise ‘due diligence’ to ensure that the PCBU complies with its duties.

Other duty-holders: Workers The Bill provides that workers must: • take reasonable care for their own health and safety; • take reasonable care that their acts or omissions do not adversely affect the health and safety of others; • comply, as far as the worker is reasonably able, with any reasonable instruction given by the PCBU to allow the PCBU to comply its duties; and • co-operate with any reasonable

policy or procedure of the PCBU relating to health or safety at the workplace that has been notified to workers.

Penalties for breaches The Bill provides for three categories of offence in relation to breaches of health and safety duties: • where a duty-holder engages in conduct that exposes any individual to whom that duty is owed to a risk of death or serious injury or illness, and is reckless as to that risk. Such an offence may attract a fine of up to $600,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years (for individuals), or (for other PCBUs) a fine of up to $3 million.

• where a duty-holder fails to comply with a duty, thereby exposing any individual to a risk of death or serious injury/illness (but without being reckless).

Such an offence may attract a fine of up to $300,000 (for individuals), or (for non-individuals) a fine of up to $1.5 million.

• where a duty-holder fails to comply with a duty. Such an offence may attract a fine of up to $100,000 (for individuals), or (for non-individuals) a fine of up to $500,000.

It is evident, therefore, that potential sentences for offences under the proposed legislation are significantly heavier than the potential sentences contained in the current law.

Summary New Zealand’s workplace health and safety regime is soon to change. There is broad agreement that the current regime is insufficient, and change is needed to bring down our high accident/ fatality rate. The proposed changes place an emphasis on proactive health and safety management, and will certainly be relevant to all farm owners and workers.

Ben Thompson is Senior Associate at Hazel Armstrong Law, specialising in ACC, health and safety and employment law

www.isn.co.nz

23

MANAGEMENT>>Comment by Tony Brownsett Sponsored article

The key to safety and productivity Tony Brownsett

I

s your drug and alcohol policy and testing regime in line with current thinking? Perhaps more importantly, is it the key to improving safety and productivity.

Our monitoring of international trends has noted a distinct change in the attitude of law makers and judges’ decisions with regard to the “recreational” and medical use of drugs in general and cannabis in particular.

A number of states in the US have recently legalised the sale, possession and consumption of cannabis for recreational use whilst many more have allowed its use for medical reasons. This mood is being reflected in many other developed countries.

While neither New Zealand nor Australia has yet gone that far legislatively, Employment Courts in both countries have given recent rulings that clearly differentiate between “social” and work situations.

For example, in 2013 Fair Work Australia banned Endeavour Energy from introducing random onsite urine testing. Senior Deputy President, Jonathan Hamberger, ruled in favour of saliva testing for drug and alcohol detection after urine testing was found to be an unreliable gauge of impairment. Fair Work Australia has determined that the introduction of urine testing would be unjust and unreasonable.

The decision was appealed both on the basis of being unjust and the basis that the AS Saliva Testing Standard had been withdrawn.

Notwithstanding those grounds on

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May/June • 2014

A Risk Management Group drug dog handler and his dog prepare to fly to an oil rig on an inspection visit January 15 this year the appeal was rejected by Mr Hamberger, who said: “I have already found that nothing that has happened since the original decision undermines the conclusions made in that decision regarding the appropriateness of using oral fluids rather than urine to detect recent drug use.

Therefore testing should continue to use oral fluid.”

The Australian Electrical Workers Union’s response was to state that: “Endeavour Energy have now have no alternative but to accept the Commission’s ruling and continue their use of oral-based testing under their drug and alcohol testing policy.

stated: “Not only is urine testing potentially less capable of identifying someone who is under the influence of cannabis, but it also has the disadvantage that it may show a positive result even though it is several days since a person has smoked the substance. This means that a person may be found to have breached the policy even though the actions were taken in their own time and in no way affect the capacity to do their job safely.”

Clearly we are seeing a softening in the attitude to recreational use of cannabis in particular but more importantly a clear distinction between what can and cannot be reasonably covered by a drug and

achieved by using urine testing at the pre-employment stage for drugs and breath or blood testing for alcohol. Urine testing will show up cannabis use for up to three months prior in habitual users.

In the workplace saliva testing is the safest initial test for current impairment as it will only show up drugs consumed within the previous six hours or so. Some saliva test kits have the added advantage of also testing for recent alcohol consumption.

Should a non-negative result be obtained from a saliva test then an attempt should be made to obtain a confession from the employee concerned, as this will usually avoid

“Good and open management is the most effective method of improving workplace performance and tackling drug and alcohol problems amongst staff.”

“This is a massive win for ETU members and this decision has wide-ranging implications across all sectors including the mining sector and transport. The ETU recognises the hard work and effort put in by our industrial and legal team and we thank members for supporting this case by providing supporting information and evidence.”

Here in New Zealand Judge Ford in a decision prior to the appeal

alcohol policy. It would seem that employers are being told that employee drug and alcohol testing must only be to detect “current impairment” rather than social habit in currently employed staff.

An appropriate testing regime?

Given the information above the first step is to ensure that drug and alcohol habitual users are kept out of the workplace. This is best

the need to undertake evidential testing and potentially ending up in a process that can lead to an expensive litigation scenario. Research into the likely outcome of such a scenario clearly indicates that employers generally end up on the wrong side of a personal grievance case.

If a confession is not forthcoming then urine testing should be used for a sample to be sent to an ac-

MANAGEMENT credited testing laboratory. If, and only if, the laboratory confirms that the sample shows that the employee was impaired at the time of testing can the test be deemed positive. Until that point all tests are merely presumptive.

Apart from compliance with recent rulings, there are other reasons why saliva testing is to be preferred in the workplace. Saliva testing is quicker, cheaper, requires no special facilities, can be undertaken by anyone at any time, is observable at all times, is tamper-proof and has no shy-bladder issues.

Perhaps most importantly is that kits test for both synthetics and alcohol as part of the same test.

Recent experience suggests that one in four non-negative tests relate to the use of synthetics.

Standard urine tests do not pick this up. The role of alcohol in accidents, incidents and near misses is greatly underestimated, especially in a country where alcohol use is high. Evidence considered by the UK Independent Inquiry on Drug Testing at Work (IIDTW) suggests that alcohol is probably a greater

cause for concern in the workplace than illicit drugs.

We note with interest that several major overseas employers actively encourage staff to self-test using saliva prior to going to work if they feel they may be unfit.

the introduction of drug testing at work. There is a wealth of evidence that good and open management is the most effective method of improving workplace performance and tackling drug and alcohol problems amongst staff.”

Does drug and alcohol testing reduce accidents and improve productivity?

Not on its own. Again the IIDTW report notes: “There is a lack of evidence for a strong link between drug use and accidents in safety critical industries, such as transport, engineering, quarrying and mining.

Clearly, however, drug- and alcohol-induced intoxication will be a source of risk in such environments.

However, other factors may have a greater impact on safety, productivity and performance, including a “don’t care culture”, bad working conditions, sleeping and health problems, excessive workloads and work-related stress.

For the majority of businesses, investment in management and staff training and systems is likely to have more impact on safety, performance and productivity than

Safety and productivity outcomes The key to improving safety and thereby productivity is to use training as a means of changing the culture of the organisation, whilst drug dogs are the best way of keeping drugs out of the workplace and drug testing is the method to identify those who cannot amend their behaviours.

This is an approach that is clearly endorsed by the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Safety.

Our vision is that safety is an integral part of everybody’s personal and workplace values. Our education system from school to the vocational and tertiary sectors supports the development of higher levels of awareness of health and safety risks, rights and obligations, and how to manage risk safely.

Active worker participation

means that workers have the training, support and knowledge to enable them to participate. An effective workplace health and safety system requires all participants to have high levels of knowledge about health and safety, and reinforces the value of that knowledge.

Participants need to understand their obligations and rights, and how to achieve good outcomes.

It will be the responsibility of all Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking (PCBU) under the new Worksafe structure and HSE Act to ensure that the Taskforce recommendations are implemented. It is a great pity, therefore, that the Minister For Tertiary Education has instructed the Tertiary Education Commission to cease funding of the specific training advocated by The Independent Taskforce.

Tony Brownett is managing director of the Risk Management Group, a multi-disciplinary team of consultants providing an integrated and innovative approach with particular emphasis on issues around drugs, alcohol and dishonesty

“ORAMA/PPPLC/PCBU/RMG?” Operational Risk Assessment, Management & Audit An integrated approach to the identification, assessment, prevention, minimisation, mitigation, management and control of all operational risks resulting from day to day commercial activities in terms of: People risks including substance abuse, sabotage, espionage, theft, fraud, faked employment histories and qualifications. By way of recent cases the theft of $400,000 by an administration manager to support a drug habit and $1,200,000 embezzlement by a Company Director.

Premises risks including unsecured access, lack of surveillance mechanisms, fire, robbery, unsafe or illegal working design and layout, blocked ingress and egress. By way of example a $9,000,000 aircraft on an open site with no fences, security or surveillance devices.

Plant risks including unsafe and unguarded machinery, lack of planned maintenance and the like that lead to fines like the $237,500 imposed on Kiwi Steel NZ Limited or the product recall resulting from delamination of a conveyor belt putting plastic into frozen food.

Process risks that may arise from incorrect initial processing methodology, change in process or the introduction of a separate product processing activity that has unforeseen impact on another product or process. For example a food processing plant that had both nut and none nut based products running in the same work area where cross contamination resulted in anaphylactic shock in consumers.

Legal Compliance in relation to Health and Safety In Employment Acts, Employment Relations Act, Food Safety Act and the like.

Proposed penalties under the upcoming HSE Act will be in the region of $3,000,000 and/or seven years imprisonment.

PCBU If you are reading this article in all probability that means YOU, as a person conducting a business or undertaking.

Risk Management Group Limited the only NZ owned and operated organisation providing a complete range of ORAMA services including the identification, assessment, prevention, minimisation, mitigation, management and control of all operational risk.

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www.isn.co.nz

25

SPECIAL FEATURE>>Lightknight International Advertisement

Building on a safety concept that will save lives

Lightknight International provides technological solutions in safety and related equipment to organisations and people. It is a company committed to going beyond compliance to improve employee safety in hazardous low light environments, providing solutions to industry need for safety technology that works

W

ith the impending new HSSE legislation, if your staff work in poor light, dawn, dusk or at night they are at increased risk of being hit by a moving object. Using only Hi Vis vests or normal lighting in many circumstances is not sufficient protection for your workers and supervisors. Owners and directors could be subject to significant penalties should an injury occur Lightknight is NZ Transport Agency approved.

When staff is required to work in low light environments, the danger of being hit by a moving object increases dramatically. Currently, work-zones use over lights and reflective high Vis in order to make workers as visible as possible to passing drivers, or machinery operators.

High-Vis strips are important, and should still be used but they are REACTIVE, only identifying the worker when a light source is directed towards them.

The rest of the time they cannot be easily seen which creates problems such as: • Inability to be effective and recognisable in low lighted areas • If there is no direct light source a worker cannot be identified • Workers can be mistaken as cat’s eyes or roadside reflective panels • Workers are not distinguished from safety equipment and signage around them • They cannot be identified from long distances and are not visible from all angles • They can become faded and ineffective The Callaghan Institute says that “Research concerning vision under low levels of illumination also indicates that night time activities relates to the situations for which man is not constructed and in which man’s visual system proves inefficient”.

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May/June • 2014

Lightknight premium safety products are designed in conjunction with industry and set a new standard in quality and safety performance of protection in the workplace enabling road workers, safety officers, emergency workers, forestry gangs, port workers, warehousing staff and miners and staff working in low light conditions to be recognised in a professional and innovative way.

Lightknight is a patented PROACTIVE self-illumination system designed to save lives by continuously identifying the person wearing it from any angle (360 degrees), in any work environment, no matter what the lighting and weather conditions are.

A recent report by a government research institution proves that the system can greatly increase the visibility of low light workers by up to 10 times*.

Testing the product in the industry environment with key players during the design process has allowed them to carefully examine the needs of the industry and create a unique life-saving product: • The light generated is distinctive and will avoid confusion with light from other equipment and signage on a worksite • It is visible from all angles, from up to 600m in low light conditions • The Power-pack for the Lightknight system is lighter than iPhone, durable, water and dust resistant • It can be retrofitted to existing work-gear • It is completely transferrable from garment to garment • Garments fitted with the Lightknight system can be washed or dry-cleaned Typical work zone characteristics and hazards include: • When setting up and taking down work zone safety barriers, workers are away from light

sources • Working in variable weather conditions, including rain, fog, snow, mist • Working under variable light conditions • Many activities being undertaken at once from all angles • Shading of light due to construction equipment • Workers moving to and from work zones (ie to work huts) move outside light sources • Worker inattention There are many situations where work must be carried out when natural daylight is not available. In close proximity scenarios artificial lighting can sometimes provide adequate illumination. However it is not always practical to locate enough light sources to remove all shadows from the workplace.

When vehicles are operated in low light conditions, the lights on the vehicle itself generally provide a significant portion of the illumination. Typically most of the illumination is projected to the front of the vehicle, while very little light is projected to the sides or to the rear.

In these areas conventional safety apparel relies on the ambient illumination in the area for it to be visible.

Light levels from the Lightknight product are significantly higher than those of the fluorescent materials, and retro reflective materials, at all viewing angles*1 Lightknight’s patented innovative features mean that your staff uses it in the same way they would interact with their existing procedures.

However, its ability to be transferred from garment to garment and the fact it can be quickly and inexpensively attached to existing safety work gear means that the Lightknight system can be easily integrated into an organisation’s operating system.

So instead of diminishing the

value of existing safety gear and replacing it as other previous products on the market have done, it will actually add significant value to the existing safety apparel that companies have invested in.

With an ergonomic, lightweight, easy to use, user focused design Coupled with quick recharging, long battery life, advanced built in audio and visual battery warnings and multi-charging support product Lightknight is one of the world’s most advanced self-illuminated High-Vis safety system for safety garments.

And it is these unique characteristics that differentiate Lightknight from others, enabling Lightknight to achieve patents and taking the end user to the next level of safety.

Previous trials of the product have returned positive feedback: "When FDL was presented with the opportunity to trial a new safety system, on behalf of a major forest management customer, I was keen to take on the project as I immediately saw an application.

“An area of concern within our industry is the safety of Log truck drivers during loading and unloading in "off road" environments in the dark. If drivers exit their trucks and are not in the direct lighting beam of a loader they are not seen even when wearing standard Hi Vis clothing. Most drivers have to carry torches’ or mount head lamps on hard hats to be seen.

“The Lightknight active illumination system is designed to be attached to and used in conjunction with, workers existing Hi Vis clothing. “The system emits a glowing blue/ white light which is visible for up to 800 meters in low light conditions. It does not need an external light source to be seen.

SPECIAL FEATURE>>Lightknight International “Several truck drivers and loader operators were asked to participate in the trail and all provided great reviews regarding the product’s performance and usability, it provided drivers with a much higher level of safety as loaders were always aware of their location, reducing the risk of an incident.

“I personally believe this type of active illumination system should be standard issue for all truck drivers operating in off road sites in low light conditions.”

HSSE Manager - FDL

“As my shifts were mainly night time, I wore the VicRoads safety vest with the Lightknight kit. In this role, the Lightknight kit was ideal, especially when giving instructions and speaking to other drivers outside of headlight or other illumination… Numerous Vicpol members observed and were impressed with the light kit”.

Geoff Smart -TSS Statewide Coordinator “...I feel that this should be included in the mandatory PPE issue requirement for all TC's and STMS personnel to name a few. I am an advocate for this essential product that will help us to achieve Zero Harm activities.”

Fulton Hogan – HSSE “... the executive recognised some six or seven years ago that we need to implement

illuminated vests, but up until now nobody has developed a practicable product... Would you consider assisting in developing a National standard” Executives at American Traffic Safety Services Association Conference in San Diego Feb 2013 The company’s objective is to reduce injuries and fatalities at workplace due to being hit by moving vehicles and objects, thereby saving costly injuries and lives.

A recent study conducted by research agency Callaghan Innovation showed that people wearing the Lightknight system were illuminated to a higher level from all angles up to 360 degrees. Traditional High Vis reflective vests were only effectively visable from 15 degrees left or right of a direct strong light source.

When the observer is not in line with the light source the material will appear dark.

As a result, the Lightknight product is seen as a great solution for the existing hazards and will lead to reduction of injuries and fatalities related to being hit by moving objects in work zones and protect people in low light close proximity environments.

The other problem with current standard retro reflective safety clothing in Class 1 and Class 2, is that the side view of a person is always blocked with wearer’s arm.

And the part been covered happens to be the centre part where the entrance angles are within 40 degrees.

Therefore, all Class 1 and Class 2 safety garment as specified in ANSI/ISEA 107/207 do not meet the 360° visibility requirement in the same standard. They are totally invisible in the side view at dark.

Each unique part of this product has been created with public acceptance in mind, enabling workers to feel safe, in the knowledge that the product that they are using is high quality, is protecting them, will alert them if its running low, and is comfortable and non-restrictive.

Since 2011 when the journey first began, after initial the meeting with SiteSafe NZ, the major construction and roading industry companies have expressed interest in their product and have engaged with us in the design pipeline.

The ability to test the product in the industry environment with key players, has allowed them to carefully examine the needs of the industry and create an ergonomically suitable product, that meets the practicality and needs that the workplace demanded.

Within several months of the product launch Lightknight has achieved significant market penetration.

THE LIGHTKNIGHT PRO THE PROACTIVE LIGHTING SYSTEM THAT FITS TO ANY CLOTHING

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Low light and Night time environments, Where employee safety is at risk LightKnight has developed a patented proactive work wear lighting system that can be used with, interchanged and swapped between virtually any work wear.

LightKnight enables your work-wear to be more visible (seen by up to 800 meters), from greater distances, from wider angles and in more challenging weather conditions than any other safety system on the market.

www.lightknight.com

www.isn.co.nz

27

FOCUS>>Fire Safety

Where’s the fire!

The Auckland Airport Industrial Fire Training Facility offers world class industrial fire training across the industrial spectrum

We have been training fire and rescue teams and emergency teams for more than 10 years and our facilities are second to none in the region says Matthew Harper. Photo by Tony Gatman

M

atthew Harper was recruited as Emergency Service Training Manager at Auckland Airport in 2008 to train the airport’s emergency fire service.

Since 2010 he has been tasked with restructuring the Auckland International Airport Fire School from providing primarily AES training needs, to offering courses tailored to individual company needs in the wider New Zealand industrial market.

The school was renamed Auckland Airport Industrial Fire Training Facility and now accommodates industrial emergency rescue teams, New Zealand defence forces and all commercial emergency based training. ”We recognise no two emergency situations are ever the same and pride ourselves on being able to tailor our courses to suit specific needs and objectives,” says Mr Harper.

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May/June • 2014

”The Auckland airport training site offers an environment of live fire and cold smoke training areas where students can gain experience in realistic emergency situations. The available facilities can simulate various emergencies to suit any industry.”

Training modules include teamwork, problem solving and leadership scenarios.

The facility can accommodate groups of up to 12 people utilising the highest quality fire safety equipment with course theory delivered in a modern classroom.

Mr Harper has succeeded in designing a fire training facility where trainees are challenged to fight live fire situations facilitated by an experienced team of instructors .

“Our instructors are professionally trained aviation and structural firefighters and are some of the best fire service educators in the Southern Hemisphere. We have trained in various academies

around the world.

“We have been training fire and rescue teams and emergency teams for more than 10 years and our facilities are second to none in the region. We train emergency rescue teams from across New Zealand and the Pacific.

“The training is thorough and rigorous and we set stringent and demanding standards - NZQA, ICAO, NZFS,” he says.

Typical customers include rescue teams, safety officers, airport staff, defence force personnel, manufacturing plant operators and small businesses.

Being located on the doorstep of an airport means attendees can hit the ground running when they arrive for training. Accommodation, catering and equipment can be provided if required. ”Our courses cover basic firefighter training, aviation firefighter induction course, advancement and promotion, fire extinguisher

training, fire warden training, aircrew cabin fire awareness training as well as maritime seafarer basic and advanced, industrial, corporate team building and leadership training, rescue team hot fire training.

Few would be better qualified than Mr Harper to run the programme. In a distinguished career he spent 22 years in the RAF and was awarded an MBE for services to the UK Military Fire Services before moving to New Zealand in 2005 for a senior management slot in the New Zealand Air Force Fire Service at the Whenuapai Air Base.

For more information, please contact: Matthew Harper MBE, Auckland Airport Industrial Fire Training Facility 09 256 8840, www.iftf.co.nz firetraining@aucklandairport. co.nz

CONSTRUCTION>>Cranes

Driving innovation through experience

By Lauren Prestney, SiteSafe In September 2012, McLeod Cranes experienced a serious near miss incident involving crane lifting a dogman in a mancage. During the lift an unpredicted gust of wind blew, causing the assistant to lose his balance and the centre of gravity in the mancage to change - now off-centre. This caused the mancage to knock a non-secured pipe weighing 500kgs into the crane cab. The 500 kg pipe fell in between the Crane Operator’s legs - missing him by a millimetre.

The main objective of drawing a lift plan is to get the team thinking about what is around them. Drawing in the other hazards around the crane such as power-lines broadens their lines of thinking.

T

he high hazards unit and Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE) Health and Safety group were alerted and as a result a drilling contractor onsite and the principal were fined for breaches of the Health and Safety in Employment Act. "Even when companies have well developed safety management systems, they must continually pay attention to the detail and not divert from the plans without going through a full hazard analysis and mitigation process, said the MBIE's chief inspector of Petroleum and Geothermal Wayne Vernon at the time.

McLeod Cranes felt they had learnt so much going through the serious harm incident that

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May/June • 2014

they wanted to pass on their key findings and innovations to the industry.

Managing director Scott McLeod and engineer/director Peter McLeod jointly developed a brand new lift plan.

They objectively looked at their companies' own lift plan document, used advice from the high hazards unit investigator, viewed other lift plans available from the Crane Association and other contractors' plans.

This review process involved stripping back the plan to its basics – and picking out what worked, and what didn't work, and what weaknesses could be improved upon.

The McLeods ascertained that the template lift plan needed to

capture all information that an investigator may potentially look to find.

In other words the plan was developed for clear root cause analysis.

"The root cause is often the hardest part to define in an incident, but it's also the most important – it's the 'aha moment,'” says Scott McLeod.

A clear issue was the amount of ambiguity implied in the document. A tick inside a box next to 'wind' for example could either mean – 'yes wind is a problem', or – 'yes wind is safe to proceed in'.

An easy fix was to provide 'Hazard Checks' definition on what a tick means: "Weather conditions checked: fine/wet/ice/wind (Circle) Ticked to indicate the conditions are OK to continue with lift."

Another weakness was the sheer amount of paperwork required.

The main concern with this is that valuable information would potentially get lost and not communicated through to the crane operator.

Yet another shortcoming was that there was no standard form of communication – and therefore different and unfamiliar forms were used on each site which could result in crane operators over-looking "particular hazards".

"For the lift plan to be accepted we identified that the plan would have to be simple to use yet powerful enough to encompass many of the lifts crane operators in a variety of machines encounter" says Scott McLeod.

Identifying training requirements As a subcontractor on the job, McLeod Cranes saw the weaknesses in the process of information transference between contractor's on site.

The lack of one standard meant that crane operators could not be trained in a regular way, to a satisfactory level – so that all relevant information was communicated to them and from them to each unique site manager.

The new lift plan document template is made up of four key areas all graphically displayed on one page.

Pages are printed in a pad, and each pad sits in a folder which is designed to display related generic information that a crane operator can use while filling out the one page template.

First area of key information: Lift Plan Details • Focus on capturing who the key people are on site in relation to the lift in terms of legal responsibility (such as the crane operator, dogman and customer representative) • The unique identification number of the crane (each crane can be a different make and model and may have particular operational quirks which the operator should be aware of) • The date and time of the lift to prove the legitimacy and validity of the lift plan filled-out document • A communication method must be ticked (either radio, hand signal or other) so that the team involved in the lift have thought about how they will communicate before the high risk job commences • A small description of the lift job is required.

"Often incidents occur on site because of assumption. An example is if a 'spotter' is doing hand signals for a truck to back into a space. The spotter has now taken on a position of responsibility. He's in charge of making sure the truck

CONSTRUCTION>>Cranes stops before impacting something.

“But then the spotter's phone rings and he turns away to answer it. The truck driver is unaware that the spotter has been distracted and continues backing in – probably into something expensive – a crane?

“The spotter has assumed the truck driver was watching and the truck driver has assumed the spotter will stop him," says Scott McLeod.

Second area of key information: Hazard Checks As an industry standard document – all those reading a filled out plan can understand what the hazard is if it is being ticked – and what that means for the site they are working in.

The crane operator uses a tick check system to identify whether these hazards are present.

For example – "Crane cert correct: Ticked indicates the crane has a valid annual inspection certificate". If the crane operator has unique information that needs to be recorded, he flips the page over and uses a table chart to fill out the detail on the 'hazard', 'control', and who is 'responsible'.

"Filling out the plan in this way means that the crane operation team is dealing with real hazards and not just presumed hazards," says Scott McLeod.

'Hazard notification required' is more concerned with all contractors on site transferring key information.

“Load support checked’: Ticked to indicate that the Customer Representative has confirmed that the ground, vessel, structure, transporter or building can support the loads when placed.

The supporting generic information on hazards is colour coded to lines of accountability. For example the dogman's responsibilities are in blue.

and 'boom length'. Supporting weight formulae is provided to assist the crane operators on top of the training they have already received.

gathers around and physically signs the plan – they all know their area of responsibility and they are all committed to getting the job done properly," says Scott McLeod.

Fourth area of key information: Lift Sketch Drawing a lift sketch is then required. The main objective of this part is to get the team thinking about what is around them. Drawing in the other hazards around the crane such as power-lines broadens their lines of thinking.

Shade in the working quadrant the crane operator will also shade in the area that identifies their direction of work in a diagram. If any aspect of the lift operation changes – the crane operator will update that diagram and follow the correct protocols for that quadrant. This means that the driver is constantly assessing the changing situation and hazards in the area.

Passing on lessons learned "As a subcontractor we go into an environment and I want to be absolutely sure that our crew will be safe. There are two parts of a deal with health and safety on a construction site: we need to know certain things from the main contractor, and we need to give them certain information about the risks we bring to site. We provide a system to make sure that all the important information from one contractor to another is transferred," says Scott McLeod.

"Ideally the lift plan would start to set a standard within all industry.

Anyone could attach the industry plan to their own documentation.

"The objective of this entire project is to get every foreman on site seeing the same piece of paper.

We want to infiltrate this system throughout all crane companies and companies that use cranes in New Zealand,” he says.

Fifth area of key information: Sign Off Each person must sign off on the lift plan document – this means they are all tied in to the job – and they know their responsibility and accountability "The lift plan ensures that each person knows that they are accountable and puts them positively in charge of key areas. Everyone

Ongoing Work The Crane Association is now moving the system through their networks and the Industry Training Organisation is using these docu-

ments. "We have good building blocks to make change and the current health and safety environment mean that businesses should be receptive to implementing new best practice systems," says Mr McLeod.

A Crane Guideline for Immediate Post Incident Management document has also been produced by the McLeods and is now in circulation. Additionally, the McLeod Cranes brothers are now in the final stages of completing their Standard Rigging Plan and Multiple Crane Lift Plan.

The lift plan would need to be a controlled document with the appropriate training to ensure it was understood and remained current.

"We want to keep control of the main development so they we can hear what is missing and then fix that, and then release that version back into all industry," says Scott McLeod.

McLeod Cranes won the MSA Safety Leadership Award, open to all business sizes, at the 2013 Site Safe Construction Health and Safety Awards.

Its Industry Standard Lift Plan and training documentation has been accepted by the Crane Association of New Zealand and Skills Organisation (ITO).

There are two parts of a deal with health and safety on a construction site - we need to know certain things from the main contractor, and we need to give them certain information about the risks we bring to site

Third area of key information: Lift Details Calculating the lift is a requirement from the crane operator every time – for example the 'weight of the load', and 'weight of rigging'

www.isn.co.nz

31

HAZMAT>>Carcinogens

Keys to curbing killer cancers The link between cancers and other chronic health problems caused by exposure to hazardous substances aren’t prominent enough, a recent forum was told

Manufacturers of metal products and wood and paper products were also identified with having a high number of workers potentially exposed to cancers, says Dr Andrea ‘t Mannetje

A

n estimated 500-800 New Zealanders die every year from occupational illness, many of those as a result of exposure to hazardous substances, Environment Minister Amy Adams told a forum on workplace carcinogens. “We are talking about a figure that could well be more than

double New Zealand’s annual road toll,” she notes.

These deaths and disabilities are largely preventable with the right combination of education, enforcement and greater investment by industry in modernising safety systems, Ms Adams maintains. “It is the responsibility of all of us to

ensure that workers are not only safe from harm at the end of each work day, but that their health is protected throughout their lifetimes.”

She says the government is committed to improving New Zealand’s poor health and safety record, citing the integration of Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act (HSNO) and the new Health and Safety at Work Bill as a crucial part of achieving this improvement.

“In the past HSNO has sometimes been considered a poor cousin to health and safety legislation,” Ms Adams concedes. “The enforcement of HSNO controls and efforts to reduce chronic harm and exposure to carcinogens has often taken a back seat to the immediate dangers posed by other workplace risks.”

The government’s reforms “clearly signal” that the safe management of hazardous substances and other workplace carcinogens is a vital part of a safe workplace. “We have given Professor Coster, the chair of the WorkSafe Establishment Board, very clear messages about the focus we expect WorkSafe New Zealand to have in addressing occupational health and workplace carcinogens.”

It is absolutely crucial, Ms Adams

Workplace study uncovers countless carcinogens

Public health researchers have identified which carcinogens are likely to contribute most to occupational cancer in New Zealand workplaces

The Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC) and MBIE study found that there are more than 50 known human carcinogens commonly present in New Zealand workplaces.

Members of the Centre for Public Health Research at Massey University’s College of Health, undertook a selective study of numerous industries

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May/June • 2014

to determine varying levels of exposure to carcinogens such as asbestos, silica and wood dust in the report for the HRC and the Department of Labour (now part of MBIE).

Research fellow Dr Andrea ‘t Mannetje says the work was prompted by a lack of national data on the extent and spread of occupational exposure to car-

cinogens in industries ranging from agriculture, the construction industry, health services and machinery and equipment manufacturing. “Manufacturers of metal products and wood and paper products were also identified with having a high number of workers potentially exposed to cancers,” she adds.

The study found that 87 per-

insists, that the Kiwi “she’ll be right” attitude that causes people to gamble with their health on a daily basis and fail to take basic yet inexpensive precautions is addressed.

“Most of us wouldn’t dream of taking passengers without them wearing their safety belts,” Ms Adams says. “But how often do we take that proactive attitude into our workplaces or the places we visit as customers?”

Businesses backsliding The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) recently conducted a study on workplace compliance with the safety requirements of hazardous substances, which found that only 25 percent of businesses surveyed complied with all eight critical controls that were examined.

“Think about how often you walk past a work site or go into a workshop and see people without the basics – safety glasses, hearing protectors, masks or sun protection,” she asks.

“The practices we ignore become the safety standards we are willing to accept.”

There are cultural and training issues that need to be addressed, and employers, colleagues and consumers all have roles to play, Ms Adams believes. “The Health and Safety Taskforce Report indicated that our national culture includes a high level of tolerance for risk and

cent of New Zealand joinery workers and 63 percent of furniture workers are exposed to inhalable wood dust levels in excess of international standards of one milligram per cubic metre.

Dr ‘t Mannetje says a review of available wood dust prevention strategies showed that educational intervention measures alone, such as risk education and providing information on good work practice only resulted in a “modest” reduction in wood dust exposure.

“Technical interventions such as employers providing work-

HAZMAT>>Carcinogens negative perceptions of health and safety,” she notes.

“In my view, much of that has stemmed from years when OSH was seen as having an overly bureaucratic focus, with too much emphasis on paper cuts and ergonomic chairs, while serious issues like the death rates from work-related cancers remained too far under the radar.”

Employers and workers alike need to be aware of the long and short term risks of workplace carcinogens and how to protect themselves from harm. “It is our job as government and industry to work harder to get the message across.”

Ms Adams’ concern at the appalling statistics in this regard has driven her to launch a range of initiatives aimed at increasing HSNO compliance, the centre of which is a three-year advertising campaign that began last November to raise public awareness about the harm caused by unsafe handling of hazardous substances.

The campaign’s images compare hazardous substances to assault weapons, guns and grenades and are intentionally confronting to get the message across. “While the effects may not be immediate, these substances can kill just as easily as other deadly weapons if not used correctly.”

Timely toolbox The EPA has also developed a

places with good ventilation and exhaust outlets, as well as promoting good cleaning standards could result in greater reductions, as was recently demonstrated in another study conducted by the Centre for Public Health Research,” she notes.

This second Massey study, also funded by MBIE and the Health Research Council, found there are more than 50 known human carcinogens commonly present in New Zealand workplaces.

Among the most common of these are asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde, involuntary

Hazardous Substances Toolbox to raise awareness among small and medium sized businesses about the risks of working with hazardous substances such as paints, solvents and liquid agrichemicals.

The toolbox includes: • A guide to working safely with hazardous substances • an online calculator that allows businesses to enter a list of their hazardous substances and learn what key controls they need in place • posters reminding workers about the health impacts of being exposed to hazardous substances and the meaning of chemical labels • five animated safety videos designed to convey key safety messages to staff • an easy reference emergency response plan.

Some 9,500 copies of the toolbox have been distributed by the EPA since its release in May 2013, but the exact total distributed is unknown as they are also distributed directly by various industry associations and organisations.

“I’ve received plenty of positive feedback about this initiative, including a letter from the manager of a small business telling me that the toolbox has made a significant difference in their health and safety culture,” Ms Adams adds.

Other successful health and safety initiative include a joint EPA and Ministry of Business, Innova-

tion and Employment targeting the collision repair sector that saw the EPA develop a guidance document and health and safety poster that was distributed by MBIE on enforcement visits to collision repair businesses.

“This is the sort of joined-up approach that the government expects from agencies,” Ms Adams observes. “Combining the EPA’s technical expertise with MBIE’s frontline role in workplaces has the potential to be applied to other sectors.”

Other industry sectors that are now being targeted include boat building, metal finishing and coating, and building finishing activities using solvents, such as joinery, carpeting and painting.

smoking, wood dust, solar radiation and occupational exposures as a painter.

Since the report was submitted the International Agency for Research on Cancer has upgraded diesel engine exhaust from probably carcinogenic to a known human carcinogen.

As part of another study investigating asbestos exposure levels in demolition sites, a survey of 91 maintenance workers including carpenters, electricians, painters plumbers and fitters revealed a general awareness of the health risks associated with the cancer-caus-

ing agent but only “moderate confidence” of just up to 40 percent of the time in their ability to detect asbestos-containing building materials.

A further study measuring silica-containing dust exposures in workers using skill saws, in which one employee was monitored for two hours while skill sawing timber to size showed that workers and other colleagues were being exposed to high levels of silica containing dust.

Overall the study indicates there are many opportunities to reduce the burden of occu-

Cutting collision costs An initiative to improve the use of personal protective equipment in the collision repair sector has also been developed between the EPA, the Collision Repair Association, paint suppliers, the Employers and Manufacturers Association, Responsible Care and MBIE. “The resulting Collision Repair Safety Pack has been distributed to those in the sector.”

A second personal protective equipment initiative being explored with the agricultural chemical sector will include guidance information for users, improvements to training, labelling and the provision of personal protective equipment

The practices we ignore become the safety standards we are willing to accept, says Environment Minister Amy Adams information at the point of sale.

Efforts to reduce harm are also supported by research into hazardous substances, such as the recent Massey University report on occupational cancer which found that there are more than 50 known human carcinogens commonly present in New Zealand workplaces.

The report indicates that the EPA’s work over the past several years in reassessing, removing and restricting many of the most dangerous substances is absolutely necessary.

“I was pleased to see that the report confirmed that New Zealand farmers were not exposed to many of the worst pesticides available internationally,” Ms Adams adds.

The EPA has also done “a lot

Continued on page 34 pation related cancer in New Zealand, which has been estimated to be between 200 and 400 deaths a year.

The Centre is undertaking additional ongoing studies including investigations into occupational asthma in New Zealand sawmill workers, the neurotoxic effects of occupational solvents exposure in the spray-painting industry and investigations into workplace cancer in the agricultural sector and among meat workers.

www.isn.co.nz

33

HAZMAT>>Carcinogens Continued from page 33 of work” over the past few years to reduce danger to farmers and agricultural workers, including requiring users of the more hazardous pesticides to be licensed and trained in how to use these substances safely. “The EPA has also removed the approvals for a number of pesticides suspected to be carcinogenic.”

Massey’s research, which is funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand and MBIE, is an example of the government and the research community working together towards successful interventions to keep New Zealanders safe. “I also want to acknowledge the research being

undertaken by the Centre for Public Health Research,” Ms Adams adds.

She says it’s vital to know what is actually happening in order to reduce occupational diseases from hazardous substances. “While we understand acute incidents, chronic harm is much harder to measure.”

The Centre for Public Health Research’s Hazardous Substances Surveillance System helps provide important information, and the centre has also developed a Hazardous Substances Disease Injury Reporting Tool which contributes information.

The Hazardous Substances Surveillance System provides information about the distribution and characteristics of exposure to hazardous substances, as well

Night time risk time

as the morbidity and mortality experienced by workers and the general public, including children, as a result of exposure to hazardous substances. “Both the Ministry for the Environment and the Environmental Protection Authority use this information for monitoring, policy development, and compliance,” Ms Adams advises.

The Hazardous Substances Disease and Injury Reporting Tool helps doctors capture information about diseases that are suspected to be caused by hazardous substances and have to be notified to the local Medical Officer of Health.

The Reporting Tool is an electronic form that links to practice management systems, making primary care notification of diseases

and injuries caused by hazardous substances simple and quick.

“The Reporting Tool is now available throughout New Zealand and I want to encourage the use of this resource,” Ms Adams urges. “The information collected will make an important contribution to hazardous substances surveillance and public health action.”

Events such as the forum are an “excellent opportunity” to increase awareness of the harm caused by workplace carcinogens and to consider ways to reduce preventable deaths caused by occupational cancer. “The government is committed to achieving results but cannot do it alone – we all have a stake in the health of our workforce,” Ms Adams concludes.

Andrea ‘t Mannetje

Shift work increases the risk of cancer, an overseas expert told the workplace carcinogens forum

D

r Aaron Blair of the US National Cancer Institute says the dangers of shift work were a growing concern as globalisation and technology meant more people were working nights.

“Up to 25 percent of the world’s population are now shift workers,” he observes. “It is pretty clear that shift work affects breast cancer, there is emerging evidence that links it to ovarian cancer and prostate cancer and it also affects the immune system, so this has an impact too.”

The main danger of shift work was that it interrupted natural circadian rhythms, increasing exposure to artificial light and preventing the body from producing the hormones that would usually be replenished with sleep.

International research was focused on identifying the extent of the cancer link and developing different types of lights to reduce harsh glare at night in a bid to cut workplace health costs.

The Danish government began paying compensation in 2009

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to women who had developed breast cancer after sustained night work, and this trend can be expected to increase as the deleterious effects of shift work become more widely known.

There is also increasing pressure for workplaces to change their cultures around sun protection for outdoor workers, with skin cancer estimated to account for about 80 percent of new cancers each year.

Wellington Hospital oncologist David Hamilton says the cancer he saw most frequently in patients were caused by the sun and non-melanoma skin cancers were so common that incidences were not even recorded in the national database.

“It tends to get a low profile because it isn’t considered as dangerous as lung cancer or bowel cancer, but I see many people dying of skin cancer,” he notes. “People whose scalps and arms are just covered in cancers can have a pretty horrible time, even if it doesn’t kill them.”

Asbestos was also a problem

and, like skin cancer, might not show up until 20 to 30 years after exposure, he adds, underlining Massey University researcher Andrea ‘t Mannetje’s findings that about eight percent of all cancer in New Zealand was linked to workplace carcinogens – a number that rose to about 25 percent for blue-collar workers.

There are more than 50 known

human carcinogens in New Zealand workplaces, including asbestos, benzene, and sun exposure, and more than 100 other possible or probable ones.

Some of the lesser-known carcinogens included viruses, pharmaceuticals, wood dust and shift work, with those most at risk working in agriculture, construction, health services and manufacturing.

MANAGEMENT>>Comment by Sidney Dekker

Zero pessimism provides an alternative approach to ensuring safety Looking at the problem from a different angle may produce better results, argues internationally renowned safety thinker Professor Sidney Dekker

Professor Sidney Dekker

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he Enlightenment once suggested that if we are smart, if we think harder about a problem with those minds we can trust, then we can make the world a better place, we can constantly improve it.

Modernism says that technical-scientific rationality can create that better, safer, more predictable, more controllable world for us. We might achieve workplaces without injuries, incidents or accidents.

If, for example, we plan the work carefully, if we design well and train, discipline, supervise and monitor the people who are going to execute the work (just like Frederick Taylor recommended), we can eventually live in a world without human error.

This ideology of constant improvement, and the vision of an immaculate “city on the hill,” is deeply embedded in the zero-visions of many industries and organisations around the world, from road traffic to construction.

Networks or forums for vision zero exist in countries around the world. Membership in these things, and the commitment it implies, gets organisations to realise safety improvements because they need to back up their commitment with resources. But these were already very safe and committed companies. Being a high achiever partly explains one’s membership in such a group.

Very little is typically known, however, about the exact activities and mechanisms that lie underneath the reductions in harm that committed companies have witnessed, and little research has been conducted into this.

Practical commitment driver One important reason for this is that the goal, the zero vision, was never driven by safety theory or research. It has grown out of a practical commitment and a faith in its

“Very little is typically known, however, about the exact activities and mechanisms that lie underneath the reductions in harm that committed companies have witnessed, and little research has been conducted into this.” morality. It is defined by its dependent variable, not its manipulated variables. In typical scientific work the experimenter gets to manipulate one or a number of variables (called the independent or manipulated variables).

These are in turn presumed to have an effect on one or a number of dependent variables. In this, safety is always the dependent variable - it is influenced by a lot of other things (independent or manipulated variables).

Increases in production pressure and resource shortages (independent variables), for example, pushes the operating state closer to the marginal boundary, leading to a reduction in safety margins (the dependent variable).

A decrease in the transparency of interactions and interconnections (the independent variable) can increase the likelihood of a systems accident (the dependent variable). Structural secrecy and communication failures associated

with bureaucratic organisation (independent variables) can drive the accumulation of unnoticed safety problems (the dependent variable).

Managerial visibility on work sites (an independent variable) can have an impact on worker procedural compliance rates (the dependent variable). Zero vision has got this upside-down. It tells managers to manipulate a dependent variable.

But safety research is mostly about manipulated variables, even though it often considers which dependent variables to look for (e.g. are incident counts meaningful dependent variables to measure?

Can we develop new indicators of resilience?).

But mostly, theories tend to specify the kinds of things that engineers, experts, managers, directors, supervisors and workers need to do to organise work, communicate about it, write standards for it. What they need to manipulate, in other words.

Outcomes (measured in terms of

incidents or accidents, or in terms of indicators of resilience) then are what they are. Zero vision turns all of this on its head. Managers are expected to manipulate a dependent variable – a complete oxymoron.

Manipulating a dependent variable is something that science considers to be either experimentally impossible or professionally unethical.

And the latter is what zero vision can become as well. With a focus on the dependent variable – in terms of how bonuses are paid, contracts are awarded, promotions are earned – fraudulent manipulation of the dependent variable (which is, after all, a variable that literally depends on a lot of things not under one’s control) becomes a logical response.

Zero evidence Not surprisingly, there is no evidence that zero vision has an impact on safety that is any greater than the next safety intervention.

This may not matter, however,

www.isn.co.nz

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MANAGEMENT>>Comment by Sidney Dekker

“Many in medicine are still battling the very idea that errors don’t occur.

They are faced daily with a world where errors are considered to be shameful lapses, moral failures, or failures of character in a practice that should aim to be perfect.”

because zero visions are a strong instrument of what is known as bureaucratic entrepreneurialism. It allows people involved in safety to say two things simultaneously: they can claim that great things have been accomplished already because of their work, but that more work is necessary because zero has not yet been reached.

And because it never will, or because the organisational fear of backsliding away from zero can be maintained, safety people will stay relevant, employed, contracted, funded. Whether people in these positions genuinely believe that injuries and accidents can be fully expunged is hard to know. But they have to be seen to believe it – in order to attract investments, work, federal grants, contracts, regulatory approval, and affordable insurance.

Does a zero vision have practical benefits though? Defining a goal by its dependent variable tends to leave organisations in the dark about what to do (which variables to manipulate) to get to that goal.

Workers, too, can become skeptical about zero sloganeering without evidence of tangible change in local resources or practices. It is easily seen as leadership double-speak.

Not only is the vision itself unable to practically engage workers, there is nothing actionable (no manipulable variables) in a mere call to zero that they can identify and work with.

Medical mistakes A zero vision also tends to stigmatise workers involved in an incident.

One of the most deeply rooted instances of this can be found in medicine, which has had its own

version of vision zero handed down through decades, centuries even.

Many there are still battling the very idea that errors don’t occur.

They are faced daily with a world where errors are considered to be shameful lapses, moral failures, or failures of character in a practice that should aim to be perfect.

Errors are not seen as the systematic byproduct of the complexity and organisation and machinery of care, but as caused by human ineptitude; as a result of some people lacking the “strength of character to be virtuous”. The conviction is that if we all pay attention and apply our human reasoning like our Enlightenment forebears, we too can make the world a better place.

The 2000 Institute of Medicine report was accompanied by a political call to action to obtain a 50% reduction in medical mistakes over five years. This was not quite a zero-vision, but halfway there.

And commit to it we must: it would essentially be our moral duty as reasonable humans. It may have exacerbated, in medicine and

elsewhere, feelings of shame and guilt when failures do happen, and led to underreporting and fudged numbers and stifled learning.

For many industries in Australia and elsewhere to move in an exact opposite direction (by basically declaring they want zero injuries or incidents) of where many safety and human factors people want medicine to go (acknowledging that errors and failures are a normal, though undesirable, part of being in that business) is quite befuddling.

Investigative resources are easily wasted too: if zero is assumed to be achievable, then everything is preventable. And if everything is preventable, everything needs to be investigated, including minor sprains and paper cuts.

Legal liabilities And if an organisation doesn’t investigate, it can even have direct legal implications. A documented organisational commitment to zero harm can lead a prosecutor to claim that if the organisation and its man-

Accountability up or responsibility down?

Professor Sidney Dekker gave New Zealand Institute of Safety Management (NZSIM) members plenty of food for thought during a presentation in Hamilton earlier year, reports Impac trainer/consultant Dan Davis

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ttendees at the NZISM Waikato Branch Professional Development Day entitled “A bureaucratic accountability up…or an ethical responsibility down!” heard Professor Dekker pose a number of interesting questions including: • is safety about the absence of negative outcomes, or the presence of positive actions?

• is safety best achieved by controlling people through rules, procedures, and efforts to

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win ‘hearts and minds’, or by harnessing the adaptive and creative capacity of people and aiming safety efforts at improving the conditions of work?

• who is the HSMS really designed to protect – the people who do the dirty and dangerous work, or the business owner?

• do we patronise people by telling them to be careful and join the ‘safety sing along’, or do we admit that the messy

practice of complicated and risky work often captures people inside impossible ethical dilemmas?

• do we rely on accident and near-miss reporting to warn of impending danger, or do we concede that as we get better at safety there are no obvious warning flags for impending catastrophe – only what has gradually become ‘normal work’?

• do we insist that safety is common sense, or do we at-

tempt to identify situations where good people become too tired and confused to muster their common sense?

Professor Dekker concluded by saying that there are no easy answers to these questions, but there is the possibility of asking sharper, more critical and probing questions.

For more information, call 0800 2 IMPAC. www.impac.co.nz

MANAGEMENT>>Comment by Sidney Dekker agers and directors really believed that all harm was preventable, then such prevention was reasonable practicable.

They are liable if harm occurs after all, since they or their workers must have failed to take all reasonably practicable steps to prevent it. Accidents are evidence that managerial control was lost; that a particular risk was not managed well enough.

Such failures of risk management open the door to look for somebody who was responsible, on whose account we can put the failure, including that of managers and directors. The 2011 harmonised OHS legislation gives prosecutors precisely that power (even though it has not been tested in court yet).

A zero vision is a commitment.

It is a modernist commitment, inspired by Enlightenment thinking, that is driven by the moral appeal of not wanting to do harm and making the world a better place.

It is also driven by the modernist belief that progress is always possible, that we can continually improve, always make things better. Past successes of modernism are taken as a reason for such confidence in progress.

After all, modernism has helped us achieve remarkable increases in life expectancy, create fantastic technologies, and reduce all kinds of injuries and illnesses. With even more of the same efforts and commitments, we should be able to achieve more of the same results, ever better!

But a commitment should never be mistaken for a statistical probability. The statistical probability of failure in a complex, resource-constrained world – both empirically, and in terms of the predictions made by the theory – simply rules out zero.

In fact, safety theorising of almost any pedigree is too pessimistic to allow for an incident- and accident-free organization. Look at man-made disaster theory, for example. On the basis of empirical research on a number of high-visibility disasters, it has concluded that “despite the best intentions of all involved, the objective of safely operating technological systems

could be subverted by some very familiar and ‘normal’ processes of organisational life”.

Informational fallibilities Such “subversion” occurs through usual organizational phenomena such as information not being fully appreciated, information not correctly assembled, or information conflicting with prior understandings of risk.

Barry Turner, father of man-made disaster theory, noted that people were prone to discount, neglect or not take into discussion relevant information. So no matter what vision managers, directors, workers or other organisation members commit to, there will always to be erroneous assumptions and misun-

through a system – sometimes so rapidly or on such a massive scale that intervention is impossible, too late, or futile. The only way to achieve a zero vision in such a system is to dismantle it, and not use it altogether: which is what Perrow essentially recommended societies to do with nuclear power generation.

Some would argue that Perrow’s prediction has not been borne out quantitatively since the theory was first publicised in 1984. Perrow’s epitome of extremely complex and highly coupled systems – nuclear power generation – has produced only a few accidents, after all.

Fukushima focus Yet the 2011 earthquake-relat-

“Investigative resources are easily wasted too: if zero is assumed to be achievable, then everything is preventable. And if everything is preventable, everything needs to be investigated, including minor sprains and paper cuts.”

derstandings, rigidities of human belief and perception, disregard of complaints or warning signals from outsiders and a reluctance to imagine worst outcomes – as the normal products of bureaucratically organising work.

Not much later, Perrow suggested in his work on Normal Accidents Theory that accident risk is a structural property of the systems we build and operate. The extent of their interactive complexity and coupling is directly related to the possibility of a systems accident.

Interactive complexity makes it difficult for humans to trace and understand how failures propagate, proliferate and interact, and tight coupling means that the effects of single failures reverberate

ed disaster at Fukushima closely followed a Perrowian script. The resulting tsunami flooded low-lying rooms at the Japanese nuclear plant, which contained its emergency generators. This cut power to the coolant water pumps, resulting in reactor overheating and hydrogen-air chemical explosions and the spread of radiation.

Also, increasingly coupled and complex systems like military operations, spaceflight and air traffic control have all produced Perrowian accidents since 1984. Zero seems out of the question.

Diane Vaughan’s analysis of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger launch decision reified what is known as the banality-of-accidents thesis. Similar to man-made disas-

ter theory, it says that the potential for having an accident grows as a normal by-product of doing business under normal pressures of resource scarcity and competition.

Telling people not to have accidents, to try to get them to behave in ways that make having one less likely, is not a very promising remedy. The potential for mistake and disaster is socially organised: it comes from the very structures and processes that organisations implement to make them less likely.

Through cultures of production, through the structural secrecy associated with bureaucratic organisations, and a gradual acceptance of risk as bad consequences are kept at bay, the potential for an accident actually grows underneath the very activities an organization engages in to model risk and get it under control.

Even high-reliability organisation (HRO) theory is so ambitious in its requirements for leadership and organisational design that a reduction of accidents to zero is all but out of reach.

Leadership safety objectives, maintenance of relatively closed operational systems, functional decentralisation, the creation of a safety culture, redundancy of equipment and personnel, and systematic learning are all on the required menu for achieving HRO status.

While some organisations may hew more closely to some of these ideals than others, there is none that has closed the gap perfectly, and there are no guarantees that manipulating and tweaking these attributes will bring an organisation at zero or keep it there.

The call to industry should be this – don’t worry about the dependent variable. It is what it is. Worry instead about the manipulable variables, and proudly talk about those.

Compare yourselves on what you do, not on what the results are.

Griffith University Professor Sidney Dekker has gained worldwide acclaim for his groundbreaking work on human error and approaching safety differently

www.isn.co.nz

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SAFETY>>Commentary by Tom McDaniel

Zero Harm expert stimulates industry rethink The thrust of the message from Siemens Global Zero Harm safety expert Tom McDaniel is that people are going to make errors but if systems are set up to detect and respond to them quickly they won’t escalate to anything more serious

One small initial human error which wasn’t detected and corrected and led to a snowballing effect. Mr McDaniel teased the audience by naming two industries and asking which they would prefer to work in: one where there were 100 million human errors a year but very few incidents, and another where one in 300 people entering the system died each year. What industries?

A slide backdrop to his presentations figured some of the major disasters of our time – the likes of Piper Alpha in the North Sea, Deep Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the space shuttle disasters, and Chernobyl; all of which resulted from one small initial human error which wasn’t detected and corrected and led to a snowballing effect.

Mr McDaniel teased the audience by naming two industries and asking which they would prefer to work in: one where there were 100 million human errors a year but very few incidents, and another where one in 300 people entering the system died each year.

What industries? The first was aviation, the second the US hospital system.

He also lamented the tendency to immediately seek to blame someone for an incident: in healthcare, he says, “they always blame the nurses”.

But that was “too easy” he feels. “The root cause is always in the culture and the organisational processes that put the nurse – or whoever was fingered for the blame – into a position where a simple error led to a major incident.”

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Focusing on the core processes within an organisation not only identified improvements to safety, Mr McDaniel says, “but you will also improve quality and productivity, and reduce loss – particularly customer loss.”

He brought some new terminology to the study of safety, looking

Violation fluctuations One graph that really grabbed attention simply plotted the number of cognitive (human) errors and violations occurring with workers (vertical axis) against the number of years the workers had been with the organisation. “Understandably, the number of errors is high for the

“It is never the first violation that causes an incident.” beyond the simple notion of risks and hazards to introduce what he termed “error-likely situations” – moments in time or particular circumstances where incidents were much more likely to occur.

The lesson there was to put in place processes that heightened safety awareness and preparedness during those error-likely periods.

Mr McDaniel also introduced the concept of “violations”, which was where workers employed risky short-cuts. “They take a short-cut and get away with it; and that becomes the norm. But then it’s only a matter of time before an incident occurs; a violation is a gamble and you want get away with it every time.”

first year or so - as you’d expect because people are new to the role or the organisation, or people don’t tell them things and so on. And then it settles of course, you see a low level for many years.

“But then you see an interesting thing happen after 20-30 years: a significant increase in human violations, and the reason for this is that workers become complacent. They become so confident in their role that they don’t think accidents can happen to them.”

Mr McDaniel says this phenomenon was one reason why Siemens, in common with many organisations, experienced a high level of violations (and thus incidents) among sub-contracting organisations.

“Guess what: it’s a double whammy: they’re very experienced in their work so you get the violations – and they’re often brand new to your business, so you get more human errors.”

This has become incredibly relevant for Siemens globally. “We have a huge number of projects around the world and much of the time the actual number of Siemens employees is relatively small; most of the workers are sub-contractors. So we have had to become very vigilant in our management of safety among subcontractors. Our approach is to treat them all as Siemens workers and require them to follow our safety processes and be part of our safety culture.”

He was dismissive of any kind of fixation on safety targets. “I’m more interested in seeing what processes you have in place, like safety training and near-miss reporting, and to hear what the culture of the organisation is like – from the very top down.”

All industries could improve their safety regardless of their maturity level, says Mr McDaniel. “Being incident-free is no guarantee about when the next incident will occur and it is no assurance of the ‘safety

SAFETY>>Commentary by Tom McDaniel

“What is typical in these organisations are incident investigations that stop when they have found the ‘culprit’.

They tend to blame people for incidents or use the term ‘human error’ to define the cause.”

health’ of the organisation.

“We find that industry is ‘stuck’ on the concept that no injuries somehow means good safety, or that decreasing incident rates means that they are doing something right. While all of the previous efforts in safety have got us to this point, we need something new to get us to the next level.”

New definition required There needs to be a new definition of safety “that is more than just incident prevention’, he says.

“While that is extremely important, such a focus fails to establish what an effective organisation should look like.

“One of the leading experts on safety prevention Erik Hollnagel says safety has been traditionally defined as a condition where ‘the number of adverse events was as low as possible’ - something Hollnagel calls ‘Safety 1’.

“But that sort of safety management is derived from the failures rather than successful events.

Safety 1 is focused on preventing something from going wrong rather than focusing on ensuring that it goes right - which is the definition of Safety II. “Most organisations focus all of their attention - and conversations - on Safety I, which up until now was all that was known. It’s time for a new maturity. “ Mr McDaniel says Siemens still

sees a “reactive” focus in some of its own organisations. “What is typical in these organisations are incident investigations that stop when they have found the ‘culprit’.

They tend to blame people for incidents or use the term ‘human error’ to define the cause. There is a conception that the processes are valid and it is only the person that creates failure, and this is especially true in organisations that tend to repeat the same processes routinely.”

Mr McDaniel says organisations must remember that the same processes that lead to success are the ones that can lead to failure. “A question for every organisation is: Why do certain processes work?

We then need to ensure that these are repeatable. There is no reason why we have to wait for a failure, to learn.

“The same processes for incident investigation can be used to investigate a success. In many cases when you examine a success, you find out why a process works as well as what risks, hazards, and error-likely situations exist - and have somehow been managed by the worker.

Once you identify those, you can eliminate them - rather than force the worker to keep having to address them. Setting the worker up for success is a key outcome of investigating successes. “ Eliminating hazards key

But giving the worker the tools and practices to get through hazards, risks, and error-likely situations is not the solution to developing a resilient organisation, he says. “Too much emphasis and effort has been put on the worker.

A major part of our programme understands this and systematically eliminates these hazards, risks, and error-likely situations. Our programme allows a person to have a bad day and still be successful. We all have bad days.

“We do work with a set of ‘truths’ that includes the concept that no one comes to work to cause a safety or quality incident, and that people want to do a good job.

While there certainly is, and always has, been the possibility of violation, we have found that violation really plays a small role in incident causation. Even in those incidents where violation was noted, in most of those cases this violation was somehow supported, condoned, or even necessary to conduct the task.

Not recognising this violation in

itself a management system weakness. It is never the first violation that causes an incident.”

Originally invited to New Zealand to present a keynote address at the NZ Wind Energy Association’s annual conference, Mr McDaniel also managed to fit in two full-day workshops, three seminars to business leaders and a number of smaller presentations to safety groups as well as Siemens staff.

Siemens New Zealand chief executive Paul Ravlich says Mr McDaniel’s visit to New Zealand was a great success. “First and foremost I think Tom brought some valuable new perspectives to safety management – that was certainly the feedback we got from those who heard him speak,” Mr Ravlich notes. “And for Siemens this was a strong reinforcement of our commitment to safety and our thought leadership in this area.”

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FORESTRY>>Progress reports

Tree traversing robot wins engineering medal

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group of University of Canterbury (UC) mechanical engineering students has won the national Ray Meyer Medal for designing a robot that can move from tree to tree.

The award by the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand (IPENZ) is made annually for the best student engineering project from all universities and polytechnics.

Winning students Scott Paulin, Sean Bayley, Thomas Gilbert and George Wareing were supervised

by Dr Stefanie Gutschmidt from UC and mentored by Crown Research Institute Scion’s Dr Richard Parker.

Capable of traversing between simulated trees in a laboratory environment, the bi-pedal robot project was supported by Scion, Future Forests Research and the Ministry of Primary Industries.

“The idea, conceived by Crown Research Institute Scion, was to design a robot that could move from tree-to-tree for navigating through a forest especially for steep slope harvesting,” Dr Gutschmidt explains. “Steep-slope robotic felling would result in a significant improvement to the safety and efficiency of forestry tree harvesting in New Zealand.”

Dr Stefanie Gutschmidt from the university and mentor for the project Scion’s Dr Richard Parker with the robot design model

Forestry safety review framework

Panel members on site with a forest crew

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he Independent Forestry Safety Review Panel has agreed a framework for its assessment and work is well underway on the development of a public consultation document.

“The framework will help the panel engage with industry stakeholders and the public,” panel chairman George Adams says. “All parts of the industry have to work together to ensure

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the forest is a safe place to work - it is about workers being able to go home at the end of a working day, every day.”

The Review Panel has drawn its framework from the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety, which found that there were three key features which “combine together within a workplace to determine the workplaces’ safety culture and collectively impact on the

workplace health and safety outcomes for the workplace.”

These features relate to the workplace, people in the workplace and work organisation.

The consultation document will set out the key issues impacting health and safety in the forestry sector as the panel understands them as well as some options for change.

“There are no silver bullets – It is clear from our work so far,

health and safety in the forest is not about one or two big changes. It will be about many changes, for everyone: forest owners, forest managers, contractors and workers,” says Mr Adans.

The panel is inviting feedback on the issues and on the options, asking for written submissions and travelling to the Whangarei, Rotorua, Gisborne, Nelson, Christchurch and Balclutha for-

FORESTRY>>Progress reports We are encouraging everyone to report all hazardous situations and safety deficiencies - Kaisa Lehtipuro

Finnish company shows the way in forestry safety

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Panel chairman George Adams on site

PM has proved forestry and its associated industries can be made safer by significantly decreasing its Lost Time Accident Frequency (LATF).

The company’s LATF decreased in 2012 and 2013 by 60 percent, while the total number of losttime accidents in all UPM sites decreased from over 550 in 2011 to 200 in 2013.

The results are due to the company-wide “Step Change in Safety 2012–2014” initiative that called on all UPM employees in to improve workplace safety.

Key success factors are management commitment, active employee participation, shared goals and operating models and encouragement.

“I’m especially glad to see that improvements have been made in all business areas and sites around the world,” says UPM president and chief executive Jussi Pesonen.

“The goal for the final year of the workplace safety initiative is to further reduce the number of accidents and, above all, to ensure world-class safety performance in all our activities.”

UPM concentrated on proactively identifying and addressing safety risks in 2013.

“We have improved employees’ awareness of the risks by organising safety training, sharing information on near-miss situations and encouraging everyone to report all hazardous situations and safety deficiencies,” says UPM director of Occupational Health and Safety Kaisa Lehtipuro.

All businesses have performed very well, she notes, the Pellos 3 plywood mill in Mikkeli, Finland, as a very good example of a very significant improvement. “In two years they succeeded in decreasing the number of work-related lost time accidents to less than onetenth of the previous amount,” Ms Lehtipuro reveals. “That is an excellent result for a mechanical forest industry facility.”

UPM’s safety themes for 2014 are health and well-being, supplier safety and preventing the most common cause of accidents: workers falling down and hurting themselves because of slipping or tripping.

Workplace safety is a daily discussion at UPM

estry regions over a three-week period in late June.

The panel will meet with key industry stakeholders, forestry health and safety experts and forestry contractors and workers in the regions as it seeks to identify and recommend a package of practical measures that would be expected to result in a significant reduction in the rate of serious injuries and fatalities in the forestry sector over the

next five years.

The Independent Forestry Safety Review that consists of businessman George Adams, health and safety lawyer Hazel Armstrong and safety expert Mike Cosman will examine the health and safety structure and culture of the forestry sector, including reviewing health and safety education and training

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FORESTRY>>Progress reports

Making a mark on workers’ memorial day The families of 11 forestry workers killed on the job last year marched on Parliament in late April to call for industry regulation to prevent more deaths

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he procession of the 100 grieving family members marked international Workers Memorial Day and was led by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (CTU), which is raising money to bring private prosecutions over at least two of the deaths.

Last year 51 Kiwis were killed in workplace accidents across a range of industries including agriculture, construction and manufacturing.

CTU president Helen Kelly says forestry was six times more dangerous than any other industry but all of the five worst industries followed a theme. “They’re all primarily de-unionised, have long hours, have very dominant employer relationships and are largely contracted where the principals don’t employ the workers,” she notes.

The CTU set up a Workers Memorial Fund to help families affected by workplace deaths mount private

“All of the five worst industries followed a theme. They’re all primarily de-unionised, have long hours, have very dominant employer relationships and are largely contracted where the principals don’t employ the workers” – Helen Kelly prosecutions if workplace health and safety regulator WorkSafe NZ doesn’t prosecute employers.

The union was providing legal support to five families over eight forestry fatalities in the central North Island, at coronial inquests in Rotorua, including two where it has sought leave to prosecute.

Four of the eight inquests have been delayed because of pending criminal proceedings, including legal action taken by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employ-

ment against a foreman over the death of 23-year-old Robert Epapara in March last year.

“Every single one of these deaths could have been avoided,” Ms Kelly claims.

Labour Minister Simon Bridges says WorkSafe NZ had a clear mandate to bring down the death and injury toll in the workplace by 25 per cent in 2020, and had taken 300 enforcement actions in the industry since August last year including shutting down 25 oper-

ations and instituting two active prosecutions.

The organisation had recently completed visits to 32 forestry owners and principals around the country while the independent industry-led inquiry into forestry safety was also under way.

Mr Bridges says the Health and Safety Reform Bill, currently at select committee, would overhaul the law and extend the duty to keep workers safe beyond the traditional employer.

Workers gain voice on ACC forestry sector injury prevention committee

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iremu Edmonds and Neil Thomas have been selected as worker representatives on the ACC’s injury prevention programme, aimed at encouraging safer practices in the forestry sector.

Both are experienced forestry workers and passionate, experienced health and safety advocates who were appointed following a nationwide ballot of forestry workers.

The ACC Forestry Sector Injury Prevention Programme is being developed and implemented in collaboration with WorkSafe NZ, the NZ Forest Owners Association (FOA), the Forestry Industry Contractors Association (FICA) and the Council of Trade Unions (CTU).

Mr Edmonds and Mr Thomas will join other key forestry sector stakeholders on the programme’s steering committee, which will meet regularly to act as an advisory group, supporting and advising ACC on how best to design and implement the programme.

ACC’s Head of Insurance Products and

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Injury Prevention, David Simpson, says the worker representatives will play a crucial role on the steering committee. “They will give a voice to those working on the ground in the industry, and contribute their understanding of what the safety issues are that confront the sector, and how these issues can be best tackled.”

The ACC programme involves eight streams of work, aimed at developing clearer, effective guides and resources for decision-makers and workers on the ground, to influence them to make safer choices in their day-to-actions.

Mr Simpson says “likely outputs of the programme include workshops, educational resources, assessment tools, videos and case studies, designed to address high risk tasks and situations that workers face on the job.”

The ACC programme is intended to complement the independent review of forestry safety, launched in January by FICA and FOA, which will address a broader palette of issues affecting safety in the sector.

HAZMAT>>Comment by Barry Dyer

Luck or sound management?

Safe chemical management throughout the supply chain

W

hen the Minister of Labour publicly proclaims only “good luck” is preventing large explosions in non-compliant chemical storage facilities, responsible chemical suppliers and their logistic partners are rightly concerned.

The Minister’s comments do not recognize the commitment and substantial investment by responsible chemical manufacturers and importers, together with transportation and storage contractors and many retailers.

The global chemical industry’s renowned Responsible Care® initiative demonstrates safe chemical management is both achievable and sustainable - but it requires leadership and the participation of employees using cost-effective compliance tools.

Responsible Care practitioners in 62 countries consistently demonstrate safe chemical management many times better than comparable hazardous industry sectors.

Company product stewardship initiatives ensure customers have compliant safety data sheets, sometimes specialist training and always the comprehensive advice needed to safely manage the product. Industry-developed compliance tools enable users and compliance agencies to easily identify and comprehensively assess HSNO compliance.

These user-friendly initiatives facilitate compliance and enable enforcement.

Regulation represents the skeleton of a world-class chemical management regime, while industry provides the muscle. Logisticians are the ‘sinews’ enabling the supply of essential chemicals to an expanding range of customers throughout the economy. Responsible warehousing and transport contractors such as Chemcouriers, who deal with hazardous substances and dangerous goods, have discovered certification to international and national Responsible Care® performance standards confirms superior workplace health and safety performance, adding

value to their business and giving confidence to existing and prospective customers. The new regulatory environment offers similar opportunities for responsible business operators to demonstrate the required improvements in chemical safety.

Audits of various businesses confirm HSNO compliance at an unacceptable 20 percent.

Given the six to eight years industry has had to comply, it is important to identify the prime reasons for this failure to protect people working with chemicals.

The HSNO legislation is prescriptive and complex.

Failing to provide the necessary infrastructure such as a full set of national performance standards (Approved HSNO Codes of Practice) continues to hinder appropriate training and qualifications for those using chemicals. The inadequate test certification system compounds problems for site operators who wish to do the right thing – truly an example of ‘not knowing what you don’t know’!

Recognizing the need to help ensure the success of the HSNO legislation, chemical suppliers are providing free technical advice.

Responsible Care NZ provides key codes of practice to enable specialist training and site compliance assessments, together with a subscriber-based 24/7 emergency response service required by transport operators.

Unique software used by WorkSafe NZ inspectors, companies and test certifiers quickly and accurately determines HSNO site compliance requirements in minutes, rather than hours.

HSNO is teaching valuable lessons about improving chemical handling in the nation’s workplaces through a process which is poorly resourced and overly bureaucratic.

Cost-effective chemical industry HSNO compliance tools, including codes which afford protection from prosecution, are not actively promoted by the responsible agency.

For example, despite an Approved HSNO Code, the EPA reports less than 40 percent of safety data sheets are compliant.

Safe chemical management must be an effective, collaborative effort between government and industry.

If we are to successfully protect people involved with chemicals, the proactive role of responsible chemical suppliers and their partners is critical.

The Health and Safety Reform Bill presently before Parliament begins the process of incorporating workplace chemical handling requirements into the new Keeping Safe at Work legislation. Acknowledging our world-class chemical management regime is poorly understood, the Minister observed proposed legislation should not create even greater compliance issues for responsible employers throughout the chemical supply chain.

Chemical suppliers welcome this opportunity to develop effective regulations reflecting the government’s own guidelines for legislation demonstrating efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, clarity and equity (http://www.med.govt. nz/business/better-public-services).

Chemical suppliers have high expectations for new workplace health and safety legislation: If intervention is justified, non-prescriptive, performance-based regulation should be minimal and expressed in plain language, supported by unambiguous performance standards.

Updating regulations by reference is both efficient and cost-effective.

Effective regulatory measures that minimize the cost of compliance.

Performance standards reflecting international best practice to maximize trade, minimize unfair competition and support harmonization with Australia.

A fair system which minimizes government involvement, provides certainty, improves performance, minimises compliance costs and recognizes above-average results.

Chemical suppliers are offering to

repeat the successful stakeholder review of draft HSNO legislation, which revealed hundreds of errors, shortcomings and improvements many of which remain unresolved.

Safeguarding those supplying and using the chemicals we need to sustain our quality of life is a key objective of every responsible business operator.

Given the opportunity, chemical suppliers and our distribution partners have a great deal to offer.

Together, we can ensure safe chemical management is a vital component of long- awaited workplace health and safety legislation.

Industry role models are the ideal way to ensure the Minister and the authorities recognize that responsible employers can deliver the sought-after improvements in safely managing chemicals in our workplaces.

Logisticians have a vested interest in helping to ensure the new workplace health and safety legislation achieves its aim.

Your input is essential and Responsible Care NZ would appreciate knowing your views, particularly about chemical-related issues.

Barry Dyer is the chief executive of Responsible Care NZ. Members and partners are committed to superior safety, health and environmental performance, particularly the safe management of hazardous substances and dangerous goods, through the global chemical industry’s Responsible Care initiative. info@responsiblecarenz.com, 04 499 4311, www.responsiblecarenz.com

www.isn.co.nz

43

TRANSPORT>>Progress reports

Scooter survival safety secrets go online

Y

ounger riders of motorised scooters are potentially putting their lives and limbs at risk by forgoing good safety practices – so ACC is taking to Facebook with its ‘Scooter Survival’ safety messages.

“Scooters are a cost effective and convenient form of transport, popular with young people,” says ACC’s Head of Injury Prevention and Insurance Products, David Simpson, “but riders can’t afford to be casual when it comes to safety.”

This is the first time ACC is using a Facebook page as part of an injury prevention initiative. “We know a lot of people use Facebook to ask questions and have conversations that are scooter-related,” Mr Simpson says. “This page provides a common space where everyone can come together to do this, and

also ask ACC questions about scooters and safety.”

The page will feature a range of safety tips and information, and ACC will post regular news on topics of interest to scooter riders.

A competition is currently running on the Scooter Survival page, and it also shows riders how to access subsidised ‘Ride Forever’ training courses across New Zealand. “These training courses are a great way for people to learn important handling skills and hazard avoidance techniques, which could help save their lives.”

Mr Simpson says now that winter is coming, scooter riders need to be more aware of things such as being visible in murky conditions, the extra stopping distance

required in the wet and how quickly fatigue can set in if riding in cold conditions.

This marks a change from summer, when too much bare skin was one of the biggest problems.

“In warmer weather, scooter riders dressed in shorts, tee-shirts and jandals are an all too common sight on the road,” Mr Simpson observes. “All that bare skin is just a disaster waiting to happen if you come off and hit tarseal.”

Last year, ACC received some 600

claims for injuries resulting from crashes involving scooters, and the cost of these claims to date is more than $900,000. Males are slightly over-represented in the injury statistics, with claims lodged by 331 males, versus 283 females.

Although all ages feature in the statistics, the highest number of claims (118) was lodged by people in the 15 -19 age bracket, with the next highest age bracket people aged between 20 and 24 (106 claims).

online driver Electronic stability Kiwi training company racking control proposals up clients in Australia

P

ublic consultation has closed on a proposal to introduce mandatory electronic stability control (ESC) in new and used light vehicles entering the New Zealand fleet.

Research carried out by the Ministry of Transport and the NZ Transport Agency indicates that mandatory ESC in New Zealand could save 22 lives and prevent 102 serious and 400 minor injuries over the next 20 years.

Statistics show that 9,486 light vehicle crashes involved a driver losing control of a light vehicle over the three years to 2012, leading to almost half of all road deaths in New Zealand during this period. The average annual social cost of these crashes was $1.27 billion (2012 dollars), which is 38 percent of the annual social cost associated with all crashes over this period.

44

May/June • 2014

The Transport Agency, in conjunction with the Ministry of Transport, therefore sought feedback on specific proposed changes to legislation to make ESC mandatory for new light vehicles (passenger and commercial) from 2015. The changes would be phased in from 2106 to 2020 for imported used light vehicles.

Identified as a road safety priority in the Government’s Safer Journeys – Road Safety Strategy to 2020, the ESC changes are not expected to significantly impact on the availability or cost of vehicles and won’t affect vehicles that don’t have ESC and are already on the road.

The Transport Agency also led the public consultation on Land Transport Rule: Light-vehicle Brakes Amendment 2014, which would make the necessary changes to legislation to implement the ESC requirements.

Local online driver training company SharpDrive is making inroads into the Australian market by signing Programmed, its biggest Trans-Tasman client to date

T

he SharpDrive programme was developed by driver training guru and former rally driver Graham Sharp, whose career highlights include a 24-hour distance driving world record, winning the 2006 EECA Energywise Rally Driver Award and the World Cup 3 Rally to the Sahara Desert in Morocco.

Co-founder Ryan Balemi says getting Programmed on board earlier this year is a significant milestone for SharpDrive, which already boasts a string of New Zealand success stories in its quest to improve fleet driver safety and reduce company fleet costs.

“Programmed is a major Aus-

tralian facilities management company with 10,000 employees and more than 1200 vehicles on the road,” Mr Balemi says. “To get their business is a coup for us.”

This latest success comes in addition to two Australian freight companies – Grace Records Management and The Infrastructure Management Group – which also signed on with SharpDrive in the same month as Programmed.

Programmed Group General Manager of Health and Safety and Environment Malcolm Deery says his company is pursuing a Zero Harm health and safety goal and SharpDrive has a role to play in achieving that.

TRANSPORT>>Progress reports

Cycle safety panel starts pedaling

An expert panel held its first set of discussions in April to develop recommendations for making New Zealand a safer place for cycling.

T

he NZ Transport Agency was asked to convene the panel in response to the findings of a coronial review of cycling safety in New Zealand, released in November last year by Coroner Gordon Matenga.

NZ Transport Agency Director of

Road Safety Ernst Zollner says the agency had canvassed the views of a wide range of stakeholders with expertise in cycling and road safety as part of the process of establishing the panel of 10 experts.

“There is a huge amount of passion and a great depth of

knowledge on cycling and cycle safety in New Zealand and we’re looking to harness that passion and knowledge to encourage cycling as a transport choice by making it safer,” Mr Zollner explains. “This panel is tasked with developing a comprehensive and practical set of

“While we have not had any major driver incidents, recent minor incidents and infringements tell us that we cannot ignore the possibility of a serious event in the near future,” Mr Deery says. “Allowing such an incident to occur without taking preventative action, such as improving driver skill, would not be consistent with our goal of Zero Harm to all Programmed people.

“We chose SharpDrive after much consideration and research into other products, and we believe the information sharing style of SharpDrive will suit our drivers.”

If the experience of Kiwi businesses is anything to go by, Programmed and other Australian sign ups can expect to reap significant benefits, not only in improved driver safety but also in terms of their bottom line.

Mr Balemi says survey information from its New Zealand clients reveals 92 percent of SharpDrive graduates believe they are

better drivers as a result of completing the SharpDrive course.

“That’s even more significant when you consider that research has also shown work vehicles cover twice as many kilometres as private vehicles but have 50 percent more accidents, even when the extra kilometres are taken into account.”

Many businesses clearly appreciate the direct costs of a road crash in terms of the physical damage to the vehicle, which is subject to an insurance claim, but are unaware of the indirect costs of vehicle accidents.

Indirect costs not covered by insurance can include sick pay, lost productivity and retraining costs for any injured worker, overtime working and temporary labour whilst an injured worker is recuperating, production delays, investigation and other administration time, and reduced residual values on repaired vehicles as well as legal costs and fines.

Mr Balemi says businesses

which invest in driver training will cut costs in all of those areas as well as through fuel economy and reduced insurance premiums.

“Insurance for larger fleets is based on claims experience and the company history with the insurer,” he observes. “If you can reduce your incident rate and give a reason for the reduction, your premiums will also reduce.”

Mr Balemi says SharpDrive plans to continue its push into the Australian market and believes that having Programmed on board will provide even greater impetus.

The SharpDrive online training programme was developed by Graham Sharp, who has spent 25 years developing and delivering successful drive courses to businesses, government agencies and organisations for company

recommendations for central and local government to achieve that.”

The panel features former Olympic gold medalist Sarah Ulmer together with industry experts, academics, trainers, traffic engineers and transport planners, and will aim to deliver its recommendations by the end of September.

The Transport Agency and other members of the National Road Safety Management Group would also continue existing work to improve the safety of cyclists in New Zealand by investing in separated cycle paths, improving the safety of roads and roadsides, making intersections safer, reducing vehicle speeds in urban areas to reduce the risks that motor vehicles can pose to pedestrians and cyclists and promoting safe cycling through a range of education programmes.

The Transport Agency recently launched a Share the Road education and advertising campaign designed to personalise and humanise people cycling so that motorists see beyond the bike.

Former rally driver Graham Sharp oversees three participants trying the SharpDrive online training modules that allow participants on both sides of the Tasman to complete the SharpDrive programme remotely vehicle and courier drivers.

The SharpDrive course content is designed to help enhance safety behind the wheel, help drivers improve their fuel economy, reduce wear and tear and generally learn to be “greener” drivers, which in turn helps graduates recover the low cost of driver training with the savings they make through better, safer and more economical driving.

www.isn.co.nz

45

FOCUS>>Footwear Sponsored article

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May/June • 2014

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