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Workplace Health & Safety Tip

Workplace Health and Safety Tip – Making Your Workplace Safer
To make your workplace safer, firstly identify hazards which have the potential to cause harm by looking at the tasks your employees are undertaking. Some hazards which are common to the industry you are working in will be obvious, others will not.

Hazard identification is best done by talking about safety with your employees and if applicable, your contractors. Consultation about health and safety is a legal requirement and is pivotal in the identification and control of workplace hazards.

Download the Statistical Summary of workplace injury claims from the WorkSafe Victoria website and obtain a history of your workplace injuries from your WorkSafe Agent. This will give you important data as to existing problems or if any patterns are emerging at both industry and site-specific level.

Some injuries/illnesses will not be immediately obvious and may develop over time such as long term exposure to chemicals or injuries associated with manual handling.

After identifying hazards, assess the risk, that is make a judgment about each hazard and decide which hazard requires the most urgent attention. A risk assessment matrix can be used to assist you in determining the severity of the risk of an event occurring to be determined. List the hazards as high, medium and low and rank them in order from highest to lowest priority. Regularly review and update the list to immediately identify any new hazards.

Once the hazards have been identified, the first action is to try and eliminate the risk. If it is not possible to totally remove the risk, ways to control it must be established.

Generally, simple solutions can be found to every-day problems and most are inexpensive and requires us to think about how work practices can be changed, altering the way we do things or using personal protective equipment to control the risk.

If administrative controls cannot be found publications, alerts and guidance notes can be accessed from WorkSafe Victoria and other reputable organisations to see if there is a documented solution to the problem. Another method is by getting help from associations or groups or people in your industry that are related to your particular industry. They may have previously encountered similar problems and found solutions.

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