Comments on: OHS – A Critical Comment by an OHS Professional

By: John

John — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:53:19 +0000

Les,
you are certainly not alone with the thoughts expressed so well. Simplification of the 4P’s and 3c’s says it all. Tie that in with some consultation and training will start to get some change to both culture and of what every business is looking for and that is a redution in real terms of injury/illness at work. What would be very nice is turn the table somewhat and approach this from from health/wellness perspective-just one of many thoughts and throw LTI’s out the window.
John

By: Gunther Gahleitner

Gunther Gahleitner — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:44:44 +0000

Les,
Interesting article and also of interest is your CEO requiring a 30% reduction in CIFR.
I once had a project manager that insisted my priority was to reduce the LTIFR by 50% in the first year. My response was for him to nominate the 4 people that he wanted hurt and I would arrange that only these 4 were injured. This would then meet my KPI’s and I could then be free to focus on ensuring no one got hurt for the rest of the year.
Needless to say that after some discussion, we were able to establish real proactive targets and indicators.
PS: No LTI’s were suffered during the project.
GG

By: Les Henley

Les Henley — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:28:57 +0000

Thanks for the supporting comment Mark,
It’s good to know that I’m not alone.
Your reference to “Incident reports” also touches one of my ‘OHS nerves’ – so many businesses are still using lag indicators such as LTIFR and CIFR to measure their ‘OHS performance’ – these were developed to benchmark and compare businesses across the spectrum.
Unfortunately they only indicate the rate of failure – they don’t even provide evidence of prevention management or even what went wrong that needs to be addressed.
We need to get them looking at lead indicators – “What did we do PROACTIVELY to PREVENT injuries?” rather than “How good did we fail?”
Some example lead indicators could be “How often did we get off our butts and identify hazards in the workplace?” And “What did we do about the deficiencies (unacceptable risks)we found?” This would cover activities such as Workplace Inspections and Hazard Reporting.
I’m just starting to get some acceptance of these types of indicators at one worksite I’m responsible to support. But our Corporation is still subject to our CEO who measures CIFR and requires a 30% reduction each year on previous year. I’m still trying to nut out how to effectively reduce CIFR when it can go up or down just based on worked hours.
Les

By: Mark Bates

Mark Bates — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:44:23 +0000

Les,
I totally agree great submission. I am also an OHS consultant; I encounter organisations that have ‘bogged’ themselves down with systems that literally were designed ‘to cover their butt.
On further personal investigation I have often found key staff is not even aware of the organisations OHS procedures and policies!
Also OHS legislation appears to me to so academic in principle and scaremongering that the key person responsible for OHS in a company has to devote so much time and energy to (covering his butt) paperwork, audits, incident analysis. He or she never gets the opportunities to actually step out onto the front line and do what I refer to as a ‘real life hazard investigation.
I have found many times the office OHS manager relies on incident reports provided as a true representation of the work place hazards, where in fact I have case studies where the incident was far greater upon real life investigation.
So in other words I say stop protecting your butt – get off your butt and go and do real life investigation for potential hazards.