Okay welcome to the little mini lecture if you like on risk management process now what I'm this is really just to give you a kind of feel for how data is useful and important in the risk management process.
well it's a cyclic process in the sense that it continues it goes on forever it's not a once-off kind of thing the first thing you have to do is identify a hazard and has it's usually determined as being a situation or process which has the possibility of injury to or or sickness over a person a can of course also include injury to property but we're not really that much interested in property so it's really we confine it to injury or sickness to person so the thing about a hazard is that in order to define a hazard there's a number of different ways you can do it you can just walk around the factory in a bit of a look if it was a factory or walk around the workplace and have a look at whatever workplace you're doing and you can identify hazard straightaway you can read articles on hazards but that becomes data and in fact even when you're walking around you're collecting data there are it's really good I found to talk to people who are involved in the processes Jarah looking at as to what the hazards are but essentially all of its data essentially all of its data if you keep it in a disorganized way there's not much you can do with that you can't sort of identify trends or changes which data is so useful for to be able to help you determine the next view stages so let's have a look what's the next stage well the next stage is to prioritize those hazards some obviously really big and worrisome others very minor some have long-term outcome problems some are very short and and straightforward like you know putting your fingers in a saw others can be long-term problems with heart pattern and sorry yeah medical problems like you know from sitting down too long for instance and there's a lot of evidence now coming up that sedentary work practices are actually quite degrading health-wise and workers but they're over long period of time so you've got more time involved in it but you can't just prioritize the count I sort of look at it and prioritize without also adding in the next stage which is assessing the risk in other words a hazard needs to be treated you need to prioritize because you can't do them all at once right you can't sort of look at them all at once or change them all at once and bring in the next stage which is controls you can't do that you've actually got to first of all assess the risk which is the likelihood of that hazard occurring and also the prioritization is not just likelihood of the hazard occurring but also what's the consequence so you need some some hazards may be in fact unlikely but their consequence is enormous besides a nuclear power plant in Japan the hazard was a tidal wave the risk was minuscule but the actual effect of the risk of the hazard was absolutely appalling so there you've got and the argument goes that they they knew there was a hazard possible because Japan is prone to to those kind of events a tsunami however even though they're they're aware of the fact that tsunamis could do it they didn't think that they would or the light would the risk was very small what of us going to all the way down to where their nuclear power plant was but nevertheless see the the risk the small the event of the hat the asset itself was extremely costly lifeWise and and also socially it moved a lot of people out of their place they won't be on either go back okay so after you've assessed the risk and prioritized the hazards to some extent that's it's not it's not a fine art its roots relatively rough that the way you do this and and you'll see why soon once you've done that you implement controls and the idea of a control well the law basically says now under the new Act that you have to control everything basically within reason anything that's that's reasonably likely to happen needs to be controlled now the trouble here is growth we have no idea what reasonable is under the Act because there are no case law cases on the new Act yet we can assume but we won't know until we see a few cases make their way through to the high court and then that will probably take six to ten years before we really have a good grasp but unfortunately just the nature of law but so we have to just assume really that any hazard needs to be controlled and it's important to start with the ones that have a high risk high chance of occurring if you like and have a high light you know injury possibility injury or sickness possibility and we need to put controls in and of course controls can be anything I mean anything can be a control from the point of wearing masks if you come to work sick to right up to serious engineering controls which he used I work in a factory at one stage I had a lot of jobs in factories my youthful as about 16 out and traveling around the world ended up in the UK and worked in the north of England and one of the jobs I had was working in a universities printing room and it had its own guillotine for cutting paper to sizes so that they could produce and print the materials that student students used and this guillotine was was enormous about 12 foot so it's about what said about 2 meters to 3 meters and 3 3 s 4 meters long was very very wide anyway great big incredibly sharp blade and very high pressure could could cut through a full ream of paper without any worries at all and perfectly and of course the danger is obviously and the danger is that you're going to have your fingers in the way when it when you work the guillotine so they're very simple control was actually quite clever they just had two buttons one button on either side so the only way that you could get it to operate was to have your hand spread wide apart and not under the blade and then you worked with your foot to there's a pedal which you push to put on that set off the guillotine and it cut now I was I thought this is pretty cool it adds pretty good control prices nothing go wrong there but then I was told by the guy working together time that the last guy here at then I looked and that he'd got did a left because of his injuries had actually used the guillotine and when it came to changing the blade and had put his fingers under the blade and then undid the Allen case which held the blade in because he had to swap the blades out and get going they went off to kids sharpened this guard held all of the blood thinking that you know it wouldn't be any problem holding on to the blade turns out the blood is a lot heavier than the guy thought and just the weight of the blade alone to all these fingers off his left hand I think they sewed him back I don't know but pretty awful but there's something that there was a risk which wasn't identified was a hazard that hasn't they knew but they hadn't assess the risk properly because I thought the risk had been controlled but it turned out that the risk Adhan being controlled now that information getting around to everybody who owns guillotines or changing a process totally said when it comes to taking the blade out there are very special protectors that go down or whatever that takes the blade out or down carefully whatever it is you can use even you know steel mesh clubs whatever there are a number of different ways you can imagine of controlling it and that was very important in the control process once you've controlled you need to then go back and you start reviewing everything and the review takes you back to identifying hazards again and the process cycles through on a constant basis never stopping never ending process it is now obviously there's data available you know identifying has it's one of them is the Australian standards which for picking up injuries and the illness in in factories and that one's a fairly broad kind of definition of things that you can look for but it doesn't really deal identify particular hazards particular businesses there are however codes of practice which do give you what do identify as it's for specific industries and do address those hazards and give you some idea of how to prioritize them in the assessment of the risk and what control measures are useful and what people have put in so you can you used that that's really all data you know it's all data that's coming in from from those sources the codes of practice the looking at the way it is we we measure and look at hazards in other industries sometimes can give you a sort of feel for it to I person think that the best method of defining hazards first up is to talk to the people working using the equipment or during the process themselves you often get a very clear understanding of hazards because there's a lot of near misses that never get reported in fact there might be I don't know I had no idea what the data is on near misses but I would imagine it would be large where something happens and and people don't bother to report at this sort of thing teas I wanted that again but it's lost to that to our data if that's the case so first of all you need to at least are identifying has its look and see what variables people use in their hazard identification form work it look and if you can get hold of the company's history of accidents Numis that will give you a large amount of data which you can sift through to get an idea of what kind of variables but don't get stuck on on the variables that are generally used across the industry reason being that although if you want a benchmark you've got a benchmark to the to the similar variables and everybody else uses that's true but the trouble is without that your the benchmarking and the process of Hazard identification will never get any better if we don't actually apply our own imagination into it as well I've all grown up out of that process through hazard identification and codes of practice change as time goes on quite how they change and how they get added to is beyond me but there be some committee process no doubt but have a look at those and that gives you the data that comes in there in terms of prioritizing and the assessment of risk data comes up again because to assess a risk you need to know how light it is it's kind of happened so if you've worried for instance if you're dealing with particular machinery that is on a production line say and you look at it and say well you know it's always possible that you'll get strains for instance you know that occur - right or you know right arm people end up with right arm strains from lifting or bad or back problems or maybe it's an you know breathing in hazardous chemicals you know because they're not properly contained or not looked after properly there's a whole bunch of those kind of things that you can find in risk assessment charting which are more variables and you've got to think about what the variables are and you can prioritize using those because you can look at say well you know look there is this hazard there may be 10 major hazards I'm looking at they've each got there they're each sort of thought you know broken into groups or whatever into single statements like strains and in you know strains and sort of musculature strains if you like penetration injuries you know you can you can think of how you might want to want to put them deep they're generally laid out in the Australian standard while it's called now the say teen 85 or something like that it was done in 1990 has I don't know whether it's been revised since then everything up it started and that's very general you know I'm not ticularly happy with that but in terms of benchmarking with industry it's not too bad but you really ought to be trying to benchmark within your own industry because it'll be much more effective than than doing looking across all industries because each one carries its own risk to prioritize you need to have an idea of the incidence of these things occurring so you know you can look at days off work resulting it from particular injuries you can look at days of work for certain illnesses but they sing still don't capture long-term effects like asbestosis which is you know didn't didn't get picked up for many many years ignite was well known about with the witne in case and it can go and I want to take you into this kind of area which is not really well covered at all in and that is that it we often look at just the worker the person who's actually employed we don't often look at a contract and contractors although we might try to we don't how control over contractors mmm is some depends on the terms of the contract we have with them and contractors often use subcontractors and we have no control over that or very little control over it unless it's within the contract framework that we set up in the beginning and my experience is that that doesn't happen very often and we also don't take into account some of the big some of the longer-term effects that it may have not just on the person but to the person's family and I've loaded to this in the past but Whitney was really interesting case because there was an asbestos mining mine and Western Australia I think and the result was a lot of people got AZ s best diocese or develop des businesses which I think happens roughly will starts to affect them roughly twenty to thirty years after exposure so a lot of people were no longer in that industry picked I met a guy who had a spare stasis in the hospital is he was in his end-stage of asbestosis and we were sitting outside having a smoke together strangely enough for both had in there for lung disease and he said you know what they all doesn't make any difference now and then he drove asbestos trucks in the mind you know that were filled up with asbestos and he just drove these trucks but there were cases brought by the wives of miners those days it was the wife who did the washing we're talking in the 50s here 40s and 50s and early 60s and it was commonplace and they were exposed to asbestos particles as well and they've successfully as far as I know know I've got to look this up and find out for sure but I'm pretty sure that they were successful in in arguing their case as well so it's not just the person who's working on the site to whom we are a duty of care at common law now that I only have to go through this with you this big difference between just the duty required and the statutory regulations legislature and also the common law requirements and the two are similar in many respects but there are also in states that allow common law suits against them which quite a few it's quite a lot of liability which is stuck to people for for incidents which doesn't come under just the legislation itself so moral net then another time I feel like um if you're interested in that I'll put that picture up on basically how the common law works and but what we should be interested in is really is how do we assess those risks and how do we given up with everything's working on a you know on a budget and so people are looking at from a point of view of how much I can actually do you know obviously ultimately you could produce them machine and in a production-line context that was impossible to injure anyone or anything at any time but it may not be feasible cost wise to do it you know there's a big argument in farming as case recently where a god I was driving a four-wheel drive down and he lost control went off the road this is in the farming context and so for like the liability saying that the farm had you know had a unsafe workplace and the court the High Court actually reviewed this and said now look this is too far going too far because I couldn't imagine a circumstance where you could make a road safe other than them what he had already done you couldn't you know I mean the only thing you could do really is to put large walls up along the side to stop cars going off the edge careering off the edge and rolling over they obviously this is an impossibility pretty much an impossibility so that really stirred the box of a bit as to what was covered and what wasn't but as I say we've got a new legislation started this year and that legislation is yet to be tested and caught and by that stage Court would be a different court anyway because people would have left at other people will have joined it so it's all a bit up near controls again can give you a good understanding particularly in the incidence of data with controls I should say particularly with the incidence of infection so if you look at a spread of infectious disease and this doesn't mean that you have to work in the you know a health or allied health area to talk about this so they obviously they're they're very important areas because you exposed to much more possible problems but you know just just general disease with Bossier of work i mean there's an obligation on the employer to provide a safe place of work safe system of work if you let people come to work who are infected with some nasty disease particularly influenza then you're exposing everybody in the organization to that and in fact the interesting thing what it could very recently is a lot of people have to fly if the work you know to fly around Australia to do particular things now quite often organizations say look you've got a fly there because you've got a meeting that meeting could easily have been held on the on the internet there wouldn't be any problem with that there's no need for a person to be physically at that meeting itself flying has a substantial risk of cross infection from people who are living in it and in fact if a person vomits on a plane there's a 70% chance of everybody on the plane being exposed to the virus that the person expels when they when they vomits out they've got h3n2 which is a seasonal flu and they vomit into their bag that vomitus aerosol is goes right the way through the plane and the I have it on the best of the advice from a professor in enviro lagea Columbia and the u.s. one of the top experts in the world that 70% of people on that plane will be exposed to that infection apart and infected virus now that's a it's pretty heavy thing and people will tell you a lot about it they'll say I'll govern the plane you know particularly long flights you know where you're going overseas say Los Angeles or whatever your exposure to cold to viruses is high because since aircraft stopped banned smoking they haven't had to recycle the air sorry that had they haven't had to put new air in if you like and it's a big cost in fuel to bring fresh air in hate it to the to the standard that's needed for the cabin using the engines and and that heat you know the heat transfer off the engines and bring it into the craft so what's happened is it it appears that viruses are much more spreading much more now than they did when people smoked in aircraft so it could be argued even that it was healthier when you were smoke you know getting secondhand smoke in an aircraft than it is now um as I've said before and by me I'm very interested in in influenza particularly seasonal influenza and it's light its effect on people and and this is one of them that you know maybe that a person flying or lying allowing persons come to to work with with flu-like symptoms and allowing them to remain in the workforce and an air-conditioned environment is in fact in breach of the act fact I would say legally it's definitely Umbridge the act but there been no cases yet that I've seen but I'm sure that will that will crop up at some stage particularly if that person then goes home and infects someone else at home so they're looking after their agent mother pardon me and their mother get some influenza and ends up in hospital and spends you know has to spend two or three weeks in a hospital or longer or dies that could be under the principle of a spot in the wit name cases could well be a common law action against the the firm for allowing them to do it because I have fully aware of the fact that they are exposing people with their policies on sickness and in the workplace they'd if they got a policy that says that they should that you should stay home if they don't actually get you to stay home in other words of own force it then it's kind of irrelevant isn't it and it's pretty easy to pull evidence up of that so there you go when it comes to review once again of course data is incredibly important because what you're doing is within your own organization you're looking to see how effective the risk management process has been in decreasing the outward sign of hazards and risk being injury and illness so if you can decrease size dude you know you're making a you know you're making reasonable fist over and that's really good so that's the end of the show basically guys folks and I shall put this up on the internet and hopefully it'll give you a little bit of entertainment to you might be kind enough to inform me as to whether you have done risk management process in any form of detail just if you can do that just by writing on the notice board there's I'll put up a little chat board I already have put up a chat that you can type anything into it's not any particular subject just just put on there if you have four and introduce themselves maybe so I know what I'm dealing with okay I'll take care
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