As part of October being National Safe Work Month, we are continuing to highlight how important safety is in the workplace and reminding you of the basic work health and safety (WHS) principles to help you proactively manage risks.
If you are an employer, you have a duty to eliminate or minimise health and safety risks as far as is practicable. It is important that you review and assess the hazards and risks that may be present in your workplace. New hazards and risks may occur from time to time particularly, if you have changed a process or introduced a new system.
Doing this gives you an opportunity to put control measures in place before an issue arises.
Here are some quick tips to get you started:
- Identify hazards: Do a walk-around the workplace and talk to your employees about any concerns or issues they may have.
- Assess the risk: You can use the information gathered from your walk-around and consultation to assess and determine the level of risk. This is essentially undertaking a risk assessment. It will help you to work out:
- how severe a risk is
- if your control measures are effective
- what action you should take to control the risk, and
- how urgently you need to take action.
(You may not need to undertake this step if the hazards, risks and control measures are well known to you. )
- Control the risk: Once you know what the hazards are you need to put in place measures to eliminate or manage the risk so far as is reasonably practicable by using the hierarchy of controls.
- Review the control measures: Review the measures you put in place to make sure they are suitable and working as needed. If they aren’t, change the control measure to one that is more suitable.
Remember, risk management should be used for both physical and psychological (mental health) risks in the workplace.
Need help?
If you have work health and safety questions, please reach out to NatRoad’s HR Advisor on 1800 272 144 or via email at [email protected] to discuss your specific situation.
