WorkCover - New South Wales

Step 1: Assign responsibilities and develop an appropriate OHS policy - Top

The first place to start is to find out the OHS requirements that apply to your business. You can then determine who will have specific OHS responsibilities. This can form the basis of your safety policy.

Your business’ health and safety policy is a statement of principle that your business upholds. It should state your business’ belief and intent, as it will be the basis for any OHS decisions and actions. Your OHS policy also demonstrates to your workers, customers and business associates your commitment to good business practice.

Make sure that your policy:

• shows commitment
• ensures accountability at all levels
• encourages cooperation
• is able to be clearly understood by employees.

How to do it

The easiest way to start is to draft a simple statement of your business’ commitment to occupational health and safety.

You can then develop the ideas in the statement by talking with your workers and any workplace OHS committees or representatives. Workers will be more committed to the policy if they’re involved in its development.

Finalise the policy and remember the policy should outline the responsibility and accountability of management and supervisors as well as other workers.

• Example OHS Policy (PDF Format - 23KB)
• Small Business Safety Starter Kit (PDF Format - 109KB)

Step 2: Plan to work safely - Top

Safety at work involves thinking about the activities that happen in your workplace and what are the risks associated with these activities. You can then identify the tasks and procedures that will control the risks. This will allow you to plan safety into each work activity.

A hazard is anything with the potential to harm life, health or property. As hazards are the prime cause of OHS problems, controlling the risk arising from them offers the greatest opportunity for reducing injury and illness in the workplace.

Hazards arise from the workplace environment, the use of equipment and chemicals in the workplace, poor work design, inappropriate management systems and procedures and human behaviour.

A set of procedures can be used in your business to identify workplace hazards. Some ways you can do this are:

1. Safety Audit
   This is a systematic and periodic inspection of the workplace to evaluate the effectiveness of the business’ health and safety system.
2. Workplace inspections
   These are regular inspections of the workplace by a good representation of the workplace, such as managers, supervisors and safety committee to observe and determine hazards that exist. Inspections involve talking with supervisors, workers, the safety committee or OHS staff representatives.
3. Review accident reports
   By reviewing past accidents and incidents you be able to identify the hazards that contributed to the incident and put in place appropriate controls to prevent similar incidents occurring again.
4. Talking to your workers
   Workers are often more aware of hazards and the possible ways of controlling them, than anyone else.
5. Injury and illness records
   Workplaces are required to keep records of injuries and illness. Many workplaces also generate reports and statistics based on workers’ compensation claims. These statistics can be analysed to show the presence of hazards in the workplace.
6. Health and environmental monitoring
   As with safety audits, monitoring may show that a substance or work process is a hazard.
7. Complaints
   Many workplace hazards are discovered through a complaint or concern being made by an employee or other person in the workplace. Complaints and concerns should always be taken seriously and acted upon. If you don’t act, you increase the risk of future accidents.

Hazard risk assessment

Once hazards have been identified, you can then assess their significance. The level of significance will determine the priority assigned to its elimination or control. There are many types of hazards: physical, chemical, and biological for example, and methods for assessing them will differ.

• When assessing hazards you should consider:
• There could be more than one cause - for example, a chemical may be toxic if split and absorbed through the skin; and a worker may not have been trained in safe clean-up procedures.
• The level of a worker’s exposure to a hazard may affect the degree of risk to injury or illness.

The severity of injury the hazard may cause.

• The employees who may be exposed to the hazards. Their skills, experience, training and physical capabilities must be taken into account. For example, the risk from manual handling hazards can be increased by a worker’s physical limitation and lack of experience in dealing with the hazard.

Workout priorities

The purpose of workplace hazard assessment is to determine the best way to prioritise and control the hazards. You should determine priorities based on the frequency and severity of injury or illness posed by the hazard.

*You can use the table below to prioritise the identified hazards.

The numbers show how important it is to eliminate or control the hazard, on a scale from 1 – 6 with 1 being extremely important and 6 being least important.

For each hazard think about how severely it could hurt someone?

* See the publication !Hazpak – Making your workplace safer – A practical guide to basic risk assessment

Eliminate or control the risks

Once the hazards have been identified and the risks assessed and prioritised, you must:

1. Eliminate the risks
   If it is not practical to do so, you must decide the best way to control the risks. The hierarchy of control ranks controls from most effective to the least effective. Not all types of controls will be feasible and more than one type of risk control may be needed to achieve the best protection. For example, ventilation and mask, goggles or gloves (PPE).
2. Substitute the hazard for less hazardous materials, equipment or substances
3. Enclose or isolate the hazard through the use of guards to protect from exposed moving parts or barriers from noise or people
4. Engineering controls
   • Provide equipment to reduce manual handling
   • Consider design when planning and introducing new work practices, equipment and substances, to ensure the design does not pose risks
   • Redesign or alter tools, equipment and work practices to make them safer
   • Provide effective ventilation through local or general exhaust ventilation systems
   • Provide effective and appropriate fire safety equipment
5. Administrative controls
   Establish appropriate administrative procedures such as:
   • Job rotation to reduce boredom or exposure to manual handling risks
   • Routine maintenance of equipment and housekeeping procedures
   • Training on hazard identification and controls
   • Training in maintenance and storage and use of personal protective equipment
6. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
   Provide suitable, properlymaintained personal protective equipment

Once you have decided on control strategies and implemented safer work procedures with PPE, tell all your workers to make sure they are informed and consulted.

Step 3: Talk with your workers about OHS matters - Top

Get support and cooperation by letting your workers know what you are doing and why you are doing it. Talk to your workers and set up ways for them to be involved and contribute to decisions that may affect health and safety in the workplace.

A consultation process could include:

• establishing a workplace OHS committee or OHS staff representatives
• having regular meetings, workshops, suggestion boxes and surveys to let workers know what you are doing
• providing general OHS information
• making sure the suggestions of all workers are valued
• ensuring management shows strong commitment to the OHS committee
• involving workers to identify and assess hazards, and working out how to control the risks.

Step 4: Develop safety procedures - Top

The tasks and jobs people do can expose them to hazards and place their health and safety at risk. These can arise from the equipment and chemicals that are used in the workplace or the physical nature of the tasks. Therefore, safe work procedures should be developed for those tasks that are likely to put the health and safety of workers at risk.

These procedures should be developed or reviewed when:

• new tasks are introduced
• new chemicals and equipment is purchased
• reviewing tasks after an incident or when a health and safety issue is identified.

In this process, you should involve the workers who will undertake the task. The following checklist should help you develop safe work procedures.

Step 5: Inform and train your workers - Top

Everyone working in your business has an OHS responsibility. Your business’ training program should develop your workers’ skills so they can do their work safely.

Your workers’ training program will be dependent on the type of work they perform. For example, workers performing complex tasks that have a greater chance of exposing them to hazards will need a more detailed training program.

An effective training program can be developed through:

• analysing work tasks and assessing the knowledge or skill level required for these tasks
• planning and conducting appropriate training and skill development for the safe performance of relevant work tasks
• planning and conducting training in safe systems of work
• including OHS principles in worker induction programs
• planning and conducting training in emergency procedures
• evaluating your training program to monitor its effectiveness
• on-the-job training of employees including apprentices.
• Informing and training staff checklist (link, document if from Small Business Safety Starter kit)

Step 6: Promote, monitor and improve your risk strategies - Top

It’s important to promote, monitor and keep improving your OHS programs and procedures. Review your programs regularly. Promotion and evaluation of programs is essential for ongoing effectiveness of your OHS policy and programs. When you review your OHS program, you should involve your OHS committee or workers.

To maintain your business’ OHS program, you could:

• communicate with people in the workplace about OHS activities including the success of your hazard controls
• make sure that OHS is integrated into all management procedures, such as planning, budgeting, performance objectives
• evaluate the success of the risk controls
• evaluate and review your education and training programs
• seek advice from workers to check whether there are any problems with the OHS programs.