Digital Health and Safety

Digital Health And Safety

Project 2022-12-03 15:22:55 +1300

I used to be a Health and safety consultant and then I had a stroke.   A severe stroke.    I have been gone from Health and Safety for about eight years.   During that time I have worked every day on my mind and also my body.   I think my mind is ready for a challenge but my body still has limitations.   I would like to go back to Health and Safety but my body could not cope with the challenge.    Before I was a consultant I worked for the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) as the Program Manager for Forestry but now my body could not cope with the terrain in forestry.   When I had the stroke my balance was affected.    The terrain in forestry would trip me up and I would fall over.   You can see what I used to do here:  

I have thought long and hard about returning to health and safety and the only way I can do it is through Digital Health and Safety.   Digital Health and Safety means that I can see and communicate with anybody in New Zealand or indeed throughout the world without ever leaving my chair in Dunedin.   I am simply using the internet to make the connection.   This has to be good for the environment.    It was evolved when we were all locked down due to Covid 19.

I am looking at a new way of doing Health and Safety as per the legislation which is based on risk. The Accident Compensation Corporation levy's are also based on risk. The more likely you are to have an accident the higher the levy. The risk based H+S system was introduced from Australia after the Pike River mine suffered an explosion. A risk based system means that because small businesses like stalls at a market that have little risk, do not need to have a comprehensive H+S system. As the business increases in size and complexity the risk goes up.

I hope to introduce three initiatives to try and make safety more effective. First of all there is a category of injuries called Manual Handling. These are common to all industries and result in slips, trips, falls, sore backs etc. There is a Code of Practice for Manual Handling which is used by both ACC and Worksafe. It is too complicated. I plan to introduce a new tool - an audit tool - which could be an App on your phone. I also plan to try and get accounting firms to do the Manual Handling audit as part of the accounting process. I will approach MYOB and Xero to try and find someone.

I plan to offer a service where businesses can get their accidents graphed. I plan to use Minitab - a statically package for the graphing. I use to do graphing of accidents for all the businesses that fell into the Worksafe Safety Evauation Scheme (WSE) when I worked for ACC.  This was often the first time that businesses had seen a graph of their accidents. 

One important thing to mention is Emergency Readiness.   Every business must prepare for emergencies like fire, wind and flooding.   This used to require little work but now we have global warming so the events are more common.  One of the solutions to emergency readiness is that people may have to leave their premises and work from home.   I plan to develop a resource on working from home. 

Finally I plan to introduce Six Sigma to the larger businesses that must improve their safety. Six Sigma is an improvement process used by many businesses throughout the world to improve their performance. When I first looked at Six Sigma I was astonished at how many tools were in H+S that were also in Six Sigma.

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