Occupational Health And Safety And Risk Management Construction Essay

The principles of the new framework are to reduce risk by requiring all stakeholders to eliminate or minimize the risks they created in workplace, Instilling greater ownership of Occupational Health and Safety standards, thus, the focus will be then be shifted from complying with prescriptive requirements to make employers suited to their particular situations in order to achieve desired safety outcomes and lastly, preventing accidents through higher penalties for poor safety and health management

Duties of employers

Every employer’s duty is to take necessary measures to ensure the safety and health of his employees and people who may be affected by his instructions even though they are not his employees in the workplace.

The measures necessary to ensure the safety and health of persons at work include, providing and maintaining a safe environment, without risk to health, ensuring adequate safety measures are taken in respect of any machinery, equipment, plant, article or process used by his employees and employees are not exposed to hazards arising out of the arrangement, disposal, manipulation, organization, processing, storage, transport, working or use of thing under the control of the employer. Developing and implementing procedures dealing with emergencies that may arise while those persons are at work and ensuring that employees at work have adequate instruction, information, training and supervision as is necessary for them to perform their work. Every employer is required by the regulations, giving to people whom are not his employees the prescribed information about details in which he conducts his undertaking as this might affect their safety or health while those employees are at his workplace.

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Duty of Workers

Occupational Health and Safety requires workers to comply with all safety and health standards that apply to their daily requirements on the job. Employees should follow the employer’s safety and health rules and use all necessary protective gears and equipments and follow safe work practices for the job directed by the employer. Employees should report all hazardous conditions to a supervisor or safety committee and report hazardous conditions to relevant authorities, if employers do not fix them.

Duties of everyone at workplace

Everyone in the workplace is to provide protection when required, any suitable protective tools, for his use alone or for use by him in common with others, for securing his safety, health while at workplace and to co-operate with his employer or any other person to such extent that will enable his employer to comply with the provisions of the Act. No employees at workplace shall wilfully or recklessly interfere with or misuse any appliance, protective clothing, convenience, equipment or other means or thing provided pursuant to any requirement under this Act for securing the safety, health of persons at workplace. Any employee who wilfully or recklessly does any act which endangers the safety or health of himself or others shall be guilty of an offence.

Task 2: Identifying Hazards and Managing Risk

A hazard is something which endangers people health or environment. Risk is the likelihood that the harm will occur from exposure to the hazard. Accidents rate will increase if the management having the mindset of “nothing will go wrong”

There might be some hazards in the working environment which are not obvious such as poor lightings, slippery floor and etc. Hence, Risk Management is crucial in all working environment. It allows the management to detect hazards early and taking all precaution to prevent accidents from occurring. There are 5 steps to perform risk management; looking for Hazard, decide who might be harm and how, decide on control measures, put control in place and review the controls

Look for hazard

Management can walk through the workplace and look for hazards in a systematic way looking at physical things and workplace activities, asking workers regarding hazards around them, conducting a safety audit and reviewing your workplace records such as sick leave and incident reports.

Decide who might be harm and how

Estimate the likelihood of an incident occurring at your workplace and the consequences if incident had occurred for each hazard. Management should involve employees in this assessment such as women who are pregnant or employees whom are not familiar in your workplace.

Decide on control measures

Measures should be implemented such as getting rid of the hazard or replacing it with a less harmful or using of protective equipments unless there is a provision that you must follow for specific hazards.

Put control in place

Management need to put controls in place and supervise through a process of systematic observation to allow a feedback on the effectiveness of the new control measures compared to the seriousness of the risk which previously assessed.

Review the Controls

Review the controls that you have put in place and makes improvements if necessary.

Task 3: Managing Psychosocial Hazards In workplace

Psychosocial Hazards are issues obstructing to a person’s psychological development in an environment. Issues like, work related stress cause by excessive overwork, violence, being bullied, mobbing and burnout. One of the most common issues that occurred in a workplace is Work Stress. There are different perspectives at looking on issue “Stress”. Stress can be looked as a form of motivation, allowing organizations to push employees to their limit and obtain the best performance out of its employees and it can be also an issue which will affects employee’s health, performance as they will be less motivated and less productive.

Excessive demands and pressure can be caused by a poor work design and poor management from an organization. Most cases of work stress are caused by how the work is designed and the way organizations are managed. Stress can affects different people in different way. Employees whom are affected by stress can become increasingly distressed and irritable, unable to relax or concentrate while working, having difficulty to think logically and making decisions and experience insomnia. In extreme cases, employees may not able to handle stress and do something that is unexpected which endangers the health of their colleagues or even themselves.

If a large numbers of employees in an organization are affected, performance of the organization will also be affected. Organizations will experience employees increasing absenteeism and decreasing commitment to work, impairing performance and productivity, unsafe working environment and damaging its image among its workers and externally. Organizations with such issues will not only affect its performance, it will also be less likely to succeed in a competitive market.

Therefore, Human Resource Department needs to understand the importance of Work Stress in an Organization. Risk Management must be managed well in order to asses all possible risks in the working environment that have high possibilities causing damage to employees and the organization. The most effective method to find out the employees problems and why, is to question them directly as managers may have a different point of view from his employees about what are the causes of the problems.

There is a strategy to solve the issue which is crucial for employer to understand is to prevent the problems, foresees problems. Monitoring employees’ satisfaction and health regularly, ensuring employees know whom to talk to about their problems and having the ability to give them a helping hand in their problems, refer them to the right channel when they are experiencing real difficulties. Managers should do a follow up after a period of time and if necessary, revise your approach to work stress problems.

A good employer not only designs and manages work in a way that avoids common risk factors for stress but also to achieve a healthy working environment, minimize harmful aspects of work. Work can be a self-promoting activity as long it takes place in a safe and health promoting environment.

Task 4: Notifying, Reporting and Managing Incidents

Immediate corrective activities are used when an accident occurred and the true nature was unknown. It is an activity that required a description of what had to be done after a problem had occurred and what are the actions were to be taken to prevent the same problem from happening.

Direct Cause

The direct cause is the direct results in actions that most people do not do. Incidents should be investigated to identify the cause of the incident. There are also tools to assist the investigation like 5 whys, cause and effect, fish bone diagram, design of experiment, simulations, process deconstruction and analysis of design implementation.

5 Whys

5 Whys is a question-asking method used to understand the cause and effect of a particular problem. 5 Whys will lead you there but sometimes it will be more, and sometimes less.

Based on the scenario, Tony was injured when he was attempting to clean the chute on the back of the truck and lost his balance and fell.

Did the Company inform all concrete drivers the safety regulations and procedures to clean a truck?

Yes. What are the reasons that Tony did not follow the Safety regulations and procedures?

No. The Company should come up with safety regulations and procedures to clean a truck.

Did all concrete drivers understand the safety regulations and procedures?

Yes. The company should impose a fine to allow the drivers to understand the importance to follow the safety regulations and procedures strictly.

No. The company should simplify the handout or even translate into difference language for difference race of employees.

Contributing Factors

Contributing causes are those careless actions that result a direct cause. Such actions may not be sufficient to result in the event taking place. Below are some examples;

Drivers parked the truck on an uneven road.

Handbrake was not properly pulled.

No proper footwear.

Preventive Activity

Preventive Activities are to prevent the same incident to occur and it can only be determined when direct and contributing factors have been identified. Solutions should be considered on its effectiveness and suitability to the company and its employees and is within the company’s budget. It is better to consider about alternatives before choosing a solution and to correct the process for a long term perspective instead of the short term.

As a project usually takes years to complete, company should implement building a station for drivers, allowing them to park the truck at their convenience and a stairs up to a floor whereby drivers are able to stand there to wash their truck with a minimum risk.

Follow-up Activity

Follow-up Activities allows company to have knowledge about whether the implementations are able to minimize risk or even any other improvements are required to achieve zero percentage of risk. Information from this process results in an effective future of the Company.

Surveillance and Supervision

Supervision of the implementation can be undertaken on a regular or periodic basis. It is to observe the performance of the implementation and ensuring drivers are using the new implementation with safety regulations and right procedures.

Monitoring

Monitoring the performance of the new implementation through a process of systematic observation and detect changes which are attributable to the new implementation.

Evaluation

Evaluation is a review of its performance and effectiveness of a new implementation, looking at what the new implementation had achieved and what could be done to improve it.