SAFEGUARD e t a upd The fortnightly briefing on health and safety in New Zealand
www.safeguard.co.nz
4 October 2010
Building design
IN ISSUE 396
New Zealand is lagging behind overseas countries in ensuring new buildings are well designed to ensure they are safe for workers to construct, operate and maintain. That is the view of Mike Cosman, managing director Impac Services, who was commenting to Safeguard on a recent UK case where an architect was fined £120,000 for breaching health and safety regulations, following the death of a subcontractor’s employee. An engineer was carrying out repairs to the air conditioning plant, built on a platform accessed by a ladder at the edge of a flat roof in a new conference centre in Somerset. The edge was only protected by a low parapet, and as the engineer climbed down the ladder he lost his footing and fell over the wall, dropping 9m to the ground. Oxford Architects Partnership pleaded guilty in the Bristol Crown Court to breaching construction (design and management) regulations. Expresss Park Construction Company, the principal contractor during the building of the conference centre, pleaded guilty to HSWA charges and was fined £75,000. An HSE inspector, Sue Adsett, said after the hearing that the case took a number of years to investigate due to its complexity, given the roles of 17 other companies. While it was rare for designers to be charged with breaching OHS legislation they had to be aware they could be held responsible where bad design was an important contributory factor, she said . “Designers must ensure that plant and equipment can be accessed safely.” Cosman said the UK had about 10 years ago introduced specific legislation (on a European directive), to deal with such cases involving poor building design. It related to anyone involved in designing a building like architects, engineers and related professions . “There is a legal obligation to ensure the building design is as safe as it can be … and where there are specific risks associated with the design, then that information must be passed on.” While working for the HSE in Britain, Cosman, as head of the construction sector, was involved in reporting back on how the new requirements were bedding in five years on. The report looked specifically at design issues around working at height. It was found about two-thirds of the engineers and architects didn’t fully understand their obligations, and were not prepared for what the law required of them. There was then virtually no OHS training for such professionals within their tertiary curriculums, Cosman said. There were also fear of litigation, and a lack of processes for allocating and charging the extra time needed to revise designs, in light of health and safety requirements. Programs were subsequently put in place by the HSE to address such issues, including a teaching package. Cosman said Australia had also been doing similar work in safe building design for the past decade, and most states had similar legal obligations to Europe. In New Zealand safe building design was still not part of the formal curriculum or training as it was overseas, Cosman said. There were no direct legal requirements under the HSE regulations on designers of buildings, unlike obligations on the designers of machinery. “New Zealand stacks up badly.” While architects and engineers were very focused on compliance with the building code, they were not turning their minds to other matters. “How, for example, will the steel erector get from one part of the structure to another … how will employees be able to change the light bulbs once it is occupied?” The focus in New Zealand was on isolation or minimisation, and not enough on elimination of the risks though the building design, Cosman said. A UK study had shown that at least half of workplace accidents in buildings were related in some way to design issues. “You need in design to think about how to safely build, operate and maintain a structure.” Even from his Wellington office, Cosman looks out to a building finished only about 18 months ago with a flat roof and no edge protection. The access to the roof-mounted air conditioning plant is a
NZ lags in safe design Leaders’ self analysis OHNs to motivate others Trade union concerns Rise in asbestos deaths WorkCover’s bullying Conference Competition News Wrap
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ISSN 1175-3161
SAFEGUARDupdate narrow ledge. “You see people shimmying along the ledge then lying down or standing looking over the 21 storey drop … we were so concerned we contacted the DoL which met with the owners.” However he said some companies were taking it upon themselves to design out safety problems. Fonterra, for example, was ensuring the design of new dairy factories provided safe access to overhead valves and filters by either enabling them to be lowered or using platforms. Regarding the recent collapse of Invercargill’s Stadium Southland, Cosman noted that appeared to be more of an issue around the building code which set out standards for structural integrity. Health and safety requirements would differ by setting out to ensure what he called the safe “buildability, operability and maintainability” of such structures.
SAFETy SElF ASSESSmENT
Over 100 New Zealand business leaders will be asking themselves some tough questions in the next few months as they set about the task of safety culture self-assessment. The newly established Business Leaders’ Forum has launched its website (www.zeroharm.org.nz) and is getting on with delivering its first projects. Forum steering group chairman, Chris Ellis (CE – Fletcher Building, Products Division) told Safeguard he was particularly excited by the development of the executive safety leadership assessment tool. “It is possibly world leading ... and has the potential to be very powerful in New Zealand.” Ellis said it reflected the focus of the forum on CEs contributions to health and safety. “We are endeavouring to stay tightly focused on those individuals because of the impacts they have on their own businesses, and together across the industry.” He said the tool was based on a safety culture assessment, to examine chief executives’ contribution to safety culture within their own businesses. “It provides a means for the CE to get an assessment of where he is.” The comprehensive online assessment was put together by consultants Drs Hillary Bennett and Philip Voss to enable the CEs to judge themselves against eight dimensions of world-class leadership. From that, they can identify their performance and establish guidelines on how they can
ISSUE 396 • 4 October 2010
improve their strengths and find development opportunities. “Once we understand where opportunities are for CEs it gives an indication of where we should be focusing initiatives for the group, so this is very instrumental.” Ellis said the results would be for individual members only, although some form of collation of the anonymous responses could help provide an overall direction. The forum had also begun establishing an OHS benchmarking and measurement tool that would allow businesses to see how they were performing against others in similar industries. Ellis said good progress was being made, with the first reports due out by early next year. “We have just finalised agreement around data security and confidentiality and very soon members will get that document and a spreadsheet to provide information to populate the database. Once that is done we will be in a position to provide reports.” Ellis said there would be a public report which would not identify the companies but show how they were to be arrayed, and how the industries were performing. A second confidential report sent to each member would identify their company and the other participating companies. “They can see how they sit within measured performances like total recordable injury frequency rates.” Data would be recorded from first aid to lost time to fatalities, but not the types of injuries, he said. “There will also be the opportunity to report statistics of both employees and contractors, but we accept not all will be able to report contractors at this point.” There are currently 106 businesses represented in the forum, and the membership was not closed. Ellis said newcomers were welcome provided they were prepared to live by the terms of the pledge. “The expectation is that businesses who are members will follow up the undertakings, and if they won’t the steering committee would have to consider their membership … but we are very carrot-focused not stickfocused at the moment.”
pRECEpTORS mOOTEd
Moves are afoot to set up a preceptor programme by which experienced occupational health nurses can nurture students and recent recruits into the profession. The programme was outlined at the recent NZOHNANZISM conference in New Plymouth by Jas Futter, a contract occupational health nurse with Northpower, in Whangarei. Futter said the occupational health nurse cohort was ageing, and faced a competencies challenge – she had herself been working in the field for 28 years. This has prompted her to get involved with establishing the pilot programme by which occupational health nurses can encourage and train nurses into the field, while also progressing their own professional skills. “Preceptors are needed to prepare the next generation of occupational health nurses, to fill the gap in our dwindling workforce and ensure the consistent flow of trained professionals following in our footsteps.” There was already a national framework established for preceptor programmes in the general nursing field. As part of the occupational health nursing project, a small working group had been set up to co-ordinate candidates for preceptorship training, with the first batch aiming to be ready
SAFEGUARDupdate to start taking on preceptees by early next year. A clinical supervisor will oversee the project which will be reviewed six monthly. “There will be tweaking and refining as we go with input from both the preceptors and preceptees, and the coordinating team.” Futter said occupational health nurses need to re-think, refresh and re-group to be united and work far better together. The preceptorship programme was a two-way learning process. “By learning you teach and teaching you learn.” The preceptor teaches professional practice from their experiences, allowing for one-on-one job training and supervision, in conjunction with e-learning and dvds. In doing so, the occupational health nurses improve their own professional skills by training peers and students – the preceptorship hours counted towards professional development, helping to upskill practitioners to meet Nursing Council requirements. Futter said the goal was to have trained preceptors in each region using the preceptor package. The training would be made available through district health boards, and in most cases should be free. “The benefits of the costs of the programme will be outweighed through improved recruitment and retention.” Judith Vercoe, NZOHNA national president, said the project would need capital to progress, but external funding had not been sourced to date. “We need to raise funds and it’s not easy to get money for occupational health nurses at the moment.” Vercoe said, however, there was an urgent need for progress, with huge support from the organisation for professional development. “In the next few months we hope to have a module on line and get feedback by the end of the year.” Dr Jim McLeod, a Northland occupational health medical practitioner, told the conference the preceptorship programme was hugely important. “It is good to see occupational health nurses moving towards this, and getting organised … it is an opportunity to leave a legacy and I encourage you to participate.” McLeod said more trained people were needed in the occupational health field, both doctors and nurses. “We need more troops on the floor. We don’t have enough doctors coming in to occupational health and I look forward to preceptorship in medicine as well … my profession is behind the 8-ball.” He had been hopeful that due to a greater number of diplomas being made available there would have been an increase in occupational medicine trained doctors. “Instead they have ended up as ACC consultants and been hijacked by an ‘insurance company’ … whose default position is no.” McLeod said those in the profession had a lot to offer those coming in behind. “The grey hair out there equals an enormous amount of experience, and we need to pass that on. It is a way to stop people making the same mistakes we did.” He said occupational health nurses and doctors had a huge responsibility so had to get their acts together. “We need new blood and people who are passionate about this … I am a noisy champion for occupational health.” McLeod believed occupational health was grossly underdone when compared to investment and attention paid to the wellness field. “We need to catch up.”
McLeod pointed to the need for excellent data management, with tailored software to crunch data and getting the information to statisticians who could interpret and share what was going on. “We’ve got to get agreement about collecting data and meeting ethical requirements around that. We’ve got to be processing data – there’s a wealth of information dying in boxes in cupboards.” McLeod also wanted to see a systematic involvement of workers in health in the workplace, not just safety. More records needed to be taken of when people started jobs or changed their roles to become involved in new processes of the plant. “We need to see what work they do and have a good understanding of their workplaces. We also need senior management buy-in.”
CTU: AmENdmENTS WOULd BREACH ILO
The NZ Council of Trade Unions says proposed amendments to the Employment Relations Act would be in breach of ILO Convention C155, ratified by New Zealand, which offers protection from disciplinary measures to workers who take action to implement their workplace’s OHS policy. Last issue the EPMU’s Fritz Drissner mentioned a number of safety-related concerns about the proposed amendments. The CTU has since made its submission on the amendment bill to the select committee, in which it says the intention to extend the 90-day trial period to cover organisations of all sizes would result in contravention of the ILO convention. In the submission it says the removal of reinstatement as a primary remedy, along with the proposed changes to union access, would be regarded as a breach. “The provisions contravene the ILO conventions on health and safety and protection of union representatives, given that [they provide] employers with the opportunity to dismiss employees for the union activities or for taking action on hazards in the workplace under cover of the untrammelled right to dismiss.” The submission says that many of the people who have approached the CTU and its affiliated unions over their treatment under the existing 90-day trial provisions believe they were dismissed because they spoke up about their concerns. “These included identifying health and safety hazards and concerns about inadequate breaks. This undermines health and safety standards, workers’ safety and general health, working conditions, and freedom to join a union.”
SAFEGUARDupdate AUSTRALIAN ASBESTOS dEATHS RISE
Annual deaths from mesothelioma in Australia have increased by 50 percent in just over a decade. Safe Work Australia figures show the number of deaths rose from 418 in 1997 to 629 in 2008. The rate of new diagnosed cases rose from 158 in 1982 to a peak of 649 in 2003, declining to 579 in 2006. These figures are from Asbestos-related Disease Indicators, a new report from Safe Work Australia, which notes that the nature of occupational exposure to asbestos has changed. Previously, the main exposure was to workers involved in asbestos mining, or in the manufacture of asbestos products, or in the use of those products in construction. Now, the main exposure to asbestos is to workers involved in the renovation or demolition of old buildings. Regarding asbestosis, the report says the rate of death has more than doubled in the ten years from 1998 to 2008, with 43 deaths attributed to asbestosis in 1998, rising to 109 in 2008. The report is available from www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au, select “Publications”, then “Data and statistics”.
BULLyINg IN NSW SAfETy AgENCy
WorkCover New South Wales, the state agency responsible for health and safety enforcement and workers’ compensation, is facing allegations that a serious bullying culture exists in one of its work groups. The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that an internal WorkCover enquiry last year found evidence of a pattern of bullying within its Licensing Solutions Unit. The paper alleged the resulting enquiry report was covered up. The Licensing Solutions Unit approves workers to drive cranes, operate forklifts and work on construction sites. The paper says the enquiry was led by one of WorkCover’s own health and safety inspectors, who concluded that bullying had been ongoing for some time. Factors he cited included selective supervision, multiple chains of command, workload equity, continuous negative feedback, and an autocratic management style. Staff were reported to have cried when interviewed for the enquiry. A unit member who resigned recently was quoted by the paper as likening the unit’s workplace culture to the former East German state secret police, the Stasi. The paper noted the irony that WorkCover’s role includes investigating allegations of workplace bullying. The NSW state government has ordered an enquiry.
LEgALSAfE IS BACk
A reminder that Safeguard’s annual one-day conference focusing on the legal compliance side of health and safety and employment is happening in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in early November. Speakers include experienced former health and safety inspector Rick Lanigan, now a practice leader within the Department of Labour, on how the department’s accident investigation process has been evolving, illustrated by a detailed case study. Andrew Confait from Hawkins Construction will also discuss his company’s experience of being prosecuted, with additional comment from their lawyer Grant Nicholson.
ISSUE 396 • 4 October 2010
Other speakers include lawyers Samantha Turner and Charlotte Hatlauf, human factors expert Hillary Bennett, and Impac managing director Mike Cosman. Full details at safeguard.co.nz
CHILdREN AT yOUR WORkpLACE
Should children be allowed in workplaces? Or totally banned on safety grounds? Or allowed in under close supervision? We all know it happens, especially during school holidays or other occasions when there are difficulties arranging childcare at home. And of course, “workplace” includes courier and other vehicles. A discussion on this topic on the Safeguard forum recently generated much debate, so Safeguard invites readers to have your say, and also to tell us about the riskiest situation in which you’ve encountered children in a workplace. Visit safeguard.co.nz to take part.
NEwS wRAP
• A skipper who died in a fishing boat accident may have been influenced by commercial pressures when anchoring in unsafe conditions in the Bay of Plenty. The 38-year-old skipper died along with a crew member, aged 35, after they abandoned ship. A Transport Accident Investigation Commission report said the decision to fish in marginal weather might have been influenced by the fishing company Sanford’s renumeration system (NZPA, September 16). • A British seaside entertainer updated his Punch and Judy routine to incorporate a health and safety inspector because he was frustrated about the rules and regulations he had to adhere to (BBC, September 16). • A 20-year-old man lost two fingers and damaged others after his hand was trapped in a crushing machine at a Rotorua (NZPA, September 17). • Frances’s air safety board found that flight-deck error, inadequate training and a maintenance slip caused the crash of an Air New Zealand jet while on a test flight over the Mediterranean, killing all seven on board. There was poor coordination between the German and NZ crews. The plane had been also been rinsed by a French maintenance company three days earlier, and water had entered sensors which skewed the avionics (NZ Herald, September 17). • A 64-year-old Rotorua man died after falling off the roof of his engineering works while trying to fit a cable during a storm. He was thought to have slipped or been blown off the roof, and fell 3.5m to the ground (NZPA, September 23). • A 64-year-old farmer died after his quad bike rolled while he was spraying on a steep hill near Hikurangi (NZPA, September 25). • A 22-year-old man suffered facial injuries after being struck in the head by a crane boom while unloading a truck at Paraparaumu. He had gone to investigage why the crane was jammed when it suddenly freed itself (NZPA, September 27). • A 50-year-old man died after a digger fell on him at a work site at Whenuakite, on the Coromandel Peninsula. A crane was used to free the man but he died at the scene (NZPA, September 28).