Show to empower businesses to 'own' safety

In the first three months of this work year, 27 Australian workers have already been killed on the job^[1].

Australian workplace safety agencies like Safe Work Australia and WorkSafe Victoria are continually emphasising how important it is that businesses take responsibility for safety in their workplaces, permeating it through company culture.

Keith Barks from Informa, the event organiser of the Safety in Action exhibitions, said creating a safety culture will be an important part of the conversation at the upcoming show to be held in Perth this June.

“We need to stress that everyone shares the responsibility for health in the workplace,” said Barks.

“An internal industry poll highlight[ed] 87% of Australian workers believe their workplace could benefit from workplace safety improvements. We should be thinking and talking about safety as a regular and ongoing part of the work day.”

The poll also showed that 42% of workers believe their workplace is not mentally healthy (ie, protects and promotes mental health and empowers people to seek help).

The role we all play in keeping ourselves and our workmates safe will be a key focus of show, with Safety Leaders Group and myosh speaking at a series of free seminars on how to empower staff to take ownership of safety and ways to measure and develop the leadership practices that drive safety.

They will be joined by others who will share the latest research and discuss regulatory compliance issues, with sessions including:

• Time for a rethink of global safety performance; Make safety leadership four-dimensional — Brett Read, Safety Leaders Group.
• The status of psychological health and its prevalence in the workplace — Dr Nathan Gibson, Chief Psychiatrist of WA; Alison Xamon, WA Association of Mental Health; Professor Rob Donovan, University of WA; and Rhianna Chisholm, Curtin Law School (Chair)
• Manage and improve work safety with software tools — Adrian Manessis, myosh
• Safety in practice; applying behaviour-based safety to serious injury and fatalities prevention — Ellen Downs, DERKA Insight
• Success in safety budgeting — Michael Stephens, Workplace Wings
• Safety lockout and tagout; gaining efficiencies through procedures — Chris Johnson, Mayo Hardware
• High-performance thinking strategies to achieve Zero Harm — Alistair Schuback, Aframes Safety
• Legality behind OHS/WHS psychological risk for large businesses/micro-skills and communication skills to approach psychological injury in the workplace — Michael Tooma and Nicholas Beech, Clyde & Co Australia
• Crisis management, emergency procedure and using data as a preventative tool — Anita Slight, Ultimate Safety Solutions Australia.

A full list of exhibitors can be found here. The Perth event is a forerunner to the national Safety in Action Exhibition (6–8 September 2016), which will be hosted at the Sydney Showground. 

For more information, go to www.safetyinaction.net.au.

^[1]As at 1 April 2016. www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/sites/swa/statistics/work-related-fatalities/pages/worker-fatalities.

Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Charles Schug