This project is being undertaken by CHASNZ for the Construction Sector Accord from November 2021 - June 2022. https://www.constructionaccord.nz/ 

The Accord is a joint commitment from government and industry to work together to create a high performing construction sector for a better New Zealand. The Construction Sector Transformation Plan (Transformation Plan) is a three-year action plan for change focused on addressing the challenges faced by the sector. The Transformation Plan was launched in January 2020 by industry and government leaders, delivering on the pledge made in the Accord to engage across the sector to develop an action plan to transform building and construction to a high performing sector.

About this Project:

Within the Health, Safety and Wellbeing workstream of the Construction Sector Transformation Plan, the Enhance Health and Safety programmes workstream seeks to support and promote the adoption ‘safety in design’ principles. This project seeks to support this initiative.   

The project aims to contribute to better health and safety outcomes through good design practice in New Zealand by: 

• Promoting and testing Health and Safety by Design (HSbD) principles and outcomes with design practitioners and stakeholders, 
• Illustrating the work done to fulfil HSbD principles and outcomes in the context of real-world design practices, and 
• Identifying opportunities to modify real-world design practices to give better effect to HSbD principles and outcomes. 

To do this we are working to: 

• Catalogue HSbD principles and outcomes and how these relate to the “model design system” and communicate and test these as the project progresses. 
• Catalogue existing HSbD guidance and industry initiatives and stakeholders. 
• Examine where the most harm is occurring in construction and the opportunities to address those predominant sources of harm through design. 
• Engage with key stakeholders (representing the Construction Sector Accord “personas”) to document design practices which illustrate the work of HSbD.  
• Identify key questions or issues to be investigated by future work. 
• Identify and scope interventions to be developed and implemented by future work to change the design system and practices to give better effect to HSbD principles and outcomes. 

Brendan Attewell is a committee member of the NZSSE, and he has been awarded Fellowship of Engineering New Zealand.

Congratulation Brendan!

Fellowship is an honoured class of membership, recognising the most highly experienced professionals who have made a huge impact on engineering in Aotearoa.

Brendan is a temporary works specialist, whose construction engineering career has been defined through heavy civil and marine infrastructure projects in New Zealand and the South Pacific. His experience includes deep basement methodologies, enabling works assessments, façade retention and party wall support schemes for iconic projects across London and the United Kingdom. Brendan facilitates temporary works risk and awareness courses for Engineering New Zealand and was the inaugural chair of the Structural Engineering Society (SESOC) Temporary Works forum.

Brendan leads a team of in-house temporary works engineers and digital design specialists for The Fletcher Construction Company. He is passionate about delivering safer workplaces.

Here is our newsletter for September 2021 (Thanks for your work Warren Wagener.)

Please click on this hyperlink: NZSSE Newsletter - Sept 2021.pdf

The online webinar videos are accessible to members after logging in to the NZSSE website. The latest video that has been made available is the presentation by Gabriella Solti on "As far as is reasonably practicable" delivered in June.

 

Date: 29 June 2021 Time: 13:00 - 17:00 UK time
Date: 30 June 2021 Time: 13:00 - 17:10 UK time

What’s this conference about?

This is a wide-ranging free online event held over two consecutive afternoons during which invited healthcare subject experts, regulators, medical device manufacturers and standards-makers share their knowledge, insights and perspectives on the key issues affecting the medical device sector now and in the next couple of years. This year’s conference will continue our emphasis on regulatory compliance and patient safety and will also reflect on COVID-19’s impact on the future of healthcare technology.

Who should attend the webinar?

Healthcare and medical device manufacturers, specifically:

• CEOs
• Regulatory affairs
• Quality affairs
• Designers
• Engineers
• Compliance officers

What will participants gain?

• Insights into the digital transformation of healthcare in the wake of COVID-19
• Advice on how to prepare for the EU IVD medical devices regulations
• Authoritative information on the introduction of the UKCA mark in May 2023
• An analysis of QMS in safety-critical industries in the light of the Ventilator Challenge
• Perspectives on the impact that sustainability will have on healthcare delivery and technology
• First sight of the standards that will support post-Brexit regulatory compliance
• An update on the issues affecting regulation and compliance in the US

Please click here to view the agenda.

To develop your personal knowledge and understanding of the key topics currently shaping this dynamic market, please book your place at the webinar now.

The presentation on 29 June from 15:20 - 16:05 will certainly be interesting.

QMS in safety-critical industries – learning from the COVID Ventilator Challenge - Eamonn Hoxey, Technical writing, training and consulting - quality & regulatory compliance, sterility assurance, standards development and Director, EV Hoxey Ltd, Teresa Perry, Global Assessment Delivery Director - Regulatory Services, British Standards Institution (BSI)

Register for the conference >

Register for the conference >

Successful implementation of Health and Safety (H&S) systems requires an effective mechanism to assess risk. Existing methods focus primarily on measuring the safety aspect. The health component, i.e., chronic harm, is more difficult to assess. Partly this is due to both consequences and the likelihood being indeterminate. There is a need for better representation for chronic health issues. This paper shows how this may be achieved.

Download the paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094849

The idea was developed at the University of Canterbury by Dr Zuzhen (Sean) Ji, Dr Dirk Pons (CPEng, FEngNZ), and Dr John Pearse. 

'We approached this from a different direction, by adopting a public health perspective of quality of life from the World Health Organisation (WHO) disability index (WHODAS). The WHODAS is a simple questionnaire that gets people to rate how their future quality of life, e.g. in retirement, might be adversely affected by hearing loss and other chronic conditions.

'We have then changed the risk assessment process to accommodate this, by creating two consequence scales. One is for safety (e.g. immediate accident outcomes), and the other is for health (e.g. chronic or future harm outcomes). We harmonised the scales, hence that word in the title. As a result, the new risk assessment can accommodate both types of occupational harm.

'A visual summary follows. Note the two scales below for consequence. You will note that the consequence values range from [2...500] - this is key. Also we found inconsistencies in the commonly used likelihood scale, and now propose that [0.1, 1, 2, 4, 6, 10] is better. 

[ https://www.mdpi.com/ijerph/ijerph-18-04849/article_deploy/html/images/ijerph-18-04849-g007-550.jpg 

Figure: Risk matrix for combined safety and accident scales.

'We also address the question of RISK APPETITE, which is the organisational response to hazards. In practical terms, these are represented by the colours [green, yellow, red, purple, grey] in the risk matrix. We propose a specific allocation as shown above. We recommend that consistent scales and colours be used within any one organisation. This is necessary so that risks can be compared.

'We also recommend the following organisational actions for the risk appetite colours.

DQL score (C x L)	Severity of harm (Color in risk matrix, see Figure 8)	Description of treatment	Actions	Authority for continued operation	Reporting
DQL> 1000	Grey	Cessation.	Immediate intermission must be undertaken. Ensure preventions and recoveries are adequate and can manage the risk in the future operations.	Board members	CEO must report and advise solutions to Board members under urgency.
120 < DQL < 1000	Purple	Unacceptable risk.	Cease operations immediately until risk has been minimized. Ensure preventions and recoveries are sufficient and it is possible to manage the risk in the future operations.	Board, and CEO	CEO need to report and advice solutions to Board as soon as practicable.
60 <  DQL < 120	Red	Urgent treatment.	Urgent treatment required. Operations proceed with caution and ongoing monitoring of risk	Technical manager	Technical manager to advise CEO as soon as possible, and report regularly on status of the risk and its treatment.
10 < DQL < 60	Yellow	Consider treatment.	Implement treatment in a reasonable time period. Continue the operations with caution. Monitor the risk in case it becomes worse.	Team leader	Team leader to report regularly to Technical manager on the risk and the progress of the treatment plan.
0 < DQL < 10	Green	Not necessary to have special treatment.	No special treatment required. Continue the operations with ongoing monitoring of the efficacy of existing preventions.	Operators	Staff to report regularly to Team leader on the state of this risk.

 

'When we applied this new method to a case study (bakery operations),  merely including the chronic harm scale appeared to be sufficient to elicit a more detailed consideration of hazards for chronic harm. This suggests that people are not insensitive to chronic harm hazards, but benefit from having a framework in which to communicate them.'

What has been achieved? The result is a comprehensive risk assessment method with consideration of safety accidents and chronic health issues. This has the potential to benefit industry by making chronic harm more visible and hence more preventable.

Implications for practitioners: Practitioners will be familiar with hearing loss and other long-term health outcomes of their place of work. In applying the method proposed here, practitioners are recommended to give regard to any widely accepted thresholds and heuristics for safe levels and durations for the various occupational hazards. This type of information is commonly available from the national H&S regulator or safety institutions.

Download the paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094849

The paper is *open access* which means it is free to download, copy, use, and adapt.

This  paper has been made open access by funding provided by the University of Canterbury, in the interests of disseminating research findings into our communities. 

Farmers are being advised to buckle up after an analysis of vehicle-related fatalities found that nearly half those that occur on farms could have been avoided if a seatbelt was being used.

The data revealed that not wearing seatbelts while on the job was the largest single factor contributing to fatal work-related incidents.

The analysis coincides with the launch of a new side-by-side vehicle simulator which will spend the next six months travelling New Zealand’s agricultural Fieldays and featuring in the FMG Young Farmer of the Year competition.

Read the full media release here:  WORKSAFE MEDIA RELEASE

The video of the Recontextualising Safety in Design that was presenteted by Russell McMullan from the City Rail Link is now available to members.

To access it, please log in to this website and look under MEMBERS where the member-only content is hosted.  Look under VIDEOS

Stuart Wright, our Ex-Officio committee member from Worksafe sent a message this morning to alert us to new content on the WORKSAFE website:

Keeping workers safe with machine lockouts 

"This guidance advises small to medium PCBUs how to use lockouts to safely isolate and de-energise the parts of machinery that could cause harm to workers when servicing this machinery."

To see their guidance follow this link:  Keeping workers safe with machine lockouts.

We welcome the effort by WORKSAFE to provide guidance, however we would like to remind everyone that lockout procedures are administrative controls, and they rely heavily on people adhering to procedures. We know sometimes they don't; The NZSSE therefore recommends, where at all possible, engineering controls or controls higher up on the Hierarchy of Control to reduce the risk further . (Higher up on the Hierarchy of Controls are typically more reliable.)

With the upcoming Webinar to be hosted the following is some really good background information about the DHR process.

https://worksafe.govt.nz/about-us/news-and-media/dont-be-scared-of-worksafe/