RMF Consulting Services Pty Ltd
Gippsland Safety Training Services
SAFETY BULLETIN No. 4-2009
Your Business MUST have access to Professional OH&S advice.
Changes to the New Victorian OH&S Act Section 22 (2) b which calls for the monitoring of health of employees at any work place now require that EVERY employer either:
Employs or engages a person or persons qualified to provide the Employer and the Employees with professional OH&S regarding the health & safety of the Employees.
This is also particularly important in light of the need to communicate formally with Employees on a regular basis
Without some form of formal arrangement which makes provision for this kind of professional advice employers will be deemed not to be complying with the requirements of the Act, which may incur a penalty of not less than $30,720 on the business and or
$6,144 on the senior management of the organisation.
RMF Consulting Services offers this Professional representation.
RMF Consulting Services Pty Ltd offers a professional representation package in the form of a “service agreement” between your business and ours which provides 24hour 7 day a week access to employers and their representatives.
The service package also provides a range of other no cost features including safety bulletins such as this one, and an amount of limited free consulting time.
Those seeking assistance may
Contact us on 1 300 735 531
Your Business MUST now address Employee “Well Being”
This new expanded thinking on section 22 (1) of the Victorian OH&S Act 2004 requires employers to monitor the Health & Well being of employees in their work place.
The Act defines Welfare and Health as Including Mental health therefore there is now a focus on the identification of stress and the management of stress in the work place.
RMF has released a 1 day course in Employee Well Being.
Look at our website to obtain further information on this new course.
Manual Handling is a major concern with links to Work Place Stress
Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD's) account for 70% of all Work Cover long Term Claims and more than 62% of all work cover costs.
Manual Handling injuries in many cases can be directly linked to Employee Well Being, meaning that “How we feel in the work place“ may have a major role to play on how safe we feel in the same work situation.
Therefore providing training in manual handling, whilst we applaud the efforts of any employer to provide this, the training may only go part of the way to addressing the real sources of many manual handling injuries.
In reality employers need to manage the entire work place and that means not just focussing on the obvious physical hazards but also the conditions and atmosphere in the work place as well.
Raising the employees sense of responsibility for self and for the others in the workplace and seeing the management of OH&S as being a shared activity will greatly reduce the incidents of “out of body”- “Inadvertent experiences” which we have as workers, this in turn will reduce what seem to be manual handling injuries.
Equipping an Employee with the correct knowledge of manual handling techniques in their industry is also vital and this knowledge will serve to offset some of the unsafe actions and decisions which many workers take when in stressful circumstances at the work place.
View our website to obtain further information on relevant courses.
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