OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY ARE WE
MEETING THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE ACT?
HAROLD GAZE
The Occupational Health and Safety Act 85
of 1993 was promulgated in 1993 and implemented in January 1994. This Act placed duties on the employer in
regard to protection of their employees and community. It also provides the
requirements the employer must implement to ensure compliance with this Act and
its Regulations. One of these duties is
to assess the risk on his/her site and then to take appropriate action (Section
8).
What was required of the employer’s risk
assessment?
Existing industries used what they had in
practice and these assessments varied.
The various professionals - Safety Practitioners, Occupational
Hygienists, Occupational Health Practitioners and others each performed risk
assessments and these were used as the risk assessment for this organisation,
activity or process. Did the legislator
envisage this or was his/her vision a broader more comprehensive Occupational
Health and Safety Risk Assessment?
An Occupational Health and Safety Risk
Assessment would assess all the various aspects which can impact on the
industry, organisation, plant or facility, activity and allocate risk to each
impact/element and identify levels of compliance and provide recommendations to
mitigate against these risks. This
assessment should rate the risks, prioritize the risks and to enable the
critical risks to be solved first.
What would be included in such an
Occupational Health and Safety Risk assessment?
The basic elements to consider would be
-Facility/Plant Design and Operation
-Education/training and communication
-Hazards
-Physical
-Chemical
-Mechanical
-Biological
-Radiation
-Special or specific environments such as
-major hazardous installations
- confined spaces
- asbestos
- lead
- work at heights
- flooding etc
-Management Occupational
and Safety Systems/Programs
It is also envisaged that the legislator
also required and still requires management/employers (CEO) to also assess some
of public or community health and safety risks (Section 9) which his/her
processes and /or activities may impact on. This would include the
surroundings, the environment, its inhabitants and also the general public and
maybe also interested and affected parties.
The impacts of these processes and/or
activities could result in a number of issues. These would include
-environmental noise
-vibration
-pollution of the environmental - air, land
or water
-contamination of community
-impacts/potential impacts of major
hazardous installations
-traffic safety issues or problems for
particular circumstances and/or projects
-access control problems
-site specific issues
-increase or introduce of diseases
-risks associated with transportation of
hazardous materials
-emergency preparedness and response
requires
-water and /or waste water quality problems
-structural safety risks
-environmental health and safety issues
-visual impacts
All the above can be assessed and rated
according to the risk obtained
Risk Assessments can be qualitative or
quantitative. In general the
Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment discussed above are likely to be
qualitative. Qualitative Risk
Assessments identify the risk, assess it and make judgements using
matrixes. Quantitative risk assessments
also identify risks assess the risk(s) and evaluate potential risks when
qualitative methods cannot provide adequate understanding of the risk and more
information is required for risk management to make judgements of risks.
The elements in an Occupational Health and
Safety Risk Assessment will be discussed in more detail using a practical case
study to issue the basic requirements for each of the elements in the
Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment.
For new project the Environmental Impact
Assessment (EIA) generally requires either a comprehensive Occupational Health
and Safety Risk Assessment or a number of individual risk assessments and/or
evaluations based on the outcomes of the scoping document(s).
The requirements for a comprehensive
Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment will be discussed using the
construction of a new road as the case study. This should identify that such
risk assessments are necessary and provide value to the employer in the design
as well the construction and operational phases of a project.
Construction of a new road can be broken
down into a number of phases. In the
discussion of the Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment it will be
divided into preparation, construction and operational phase.
