In this post, we take a deeper look at the primary duty of care for businesses and undertakings under the Australian work health and safety legislation. Check out the video below, as well as the edited transcript below that.
This video is an expansion and extension from our work health and safety legislation and duty of care videos. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts I’d recommend that you check these out before diving into this one.
Primary Duty of Care – Australian WHS Legislation
Introduction
Today we’re going to be talking about the primary duty of care for businesses under the Australian work health and safety legislation. We outlined this in a little bit of detail in our Australian work health and safety legislation video, as well as our general work health and safety duties video. So if you haven’t seen these before it would be well worth your while jumping back and having a quick look at those before moving on, because we’re going to be breaking down this primary duty of care and having a closer look at the key elements, what they mean and how we can achieve them.
Safe Work Environment:
When we’re talking about maintaining a safe work environment, we’re really talking about where the worker physically works. This might include the physical buildings and workplace, but it might also include things like vehicles as well as the home work environment. Things that we should be looking out for here are things like floor surfaces – making sure that they’re free of trip hazards. We’re also looking at things like handrails and making sure that there’s minimal risk or no risk of falling from a height. Entry and exits should have clear and safe exit paths in an emergency. We could also be talking about things like air quality. Different working environments might have risks of poor air quality. Other things may also be relevant, like ergonomics, manual handling and those sorts of things.
So, how can we really achieve this duty of care? How can we make sure as a business we’re maintaining a safe working environment? Well, I think our hazard and risk management process is the key here; and really the key element of this is going to be the inspection and review process. We need to have a regular hazard inspection and review process and anything too serious we find should be subject to a risk assessment. There are some things like air quality and other complex issues that have you can be dealt with through good workplace monitoring, and that might need to be done by someone else with expertise and equipment. We’ll have another look at that a little bit later on as well. Other things like getting your workers involved a bit more through hazard reports, consultation in toolbox talks are also recommended.
There also may be some times where you need to get an external party in just to clarify, or give you more thorough testing and a good example of this is slip testing. There is a process where you can make sure that the floor surfaces are not too slippery. Of course, the key is that we don’t just do it as a one-off, we do it regularly, and we set it up into a system.
Safe Plant and Structures
I want to just move on now and have a little bit of a look at our second element which is going to be safe plant and structures. So now we’re not so much talking about the physical building and workplace, we’re talking about the things that people use. Installations, equipment and machinery are good examples. Another good example is motor vehicles. Most companies will have at least one or two vehicles that the company provides for employees to drive in. It could also be heavy machinery if you’re in a construction type workplace, or large manufacturing perhaps. It could be if you’re in a warehousing situation all your load shifting equipment – forklifts, order pickers those sorts of things. It could be something smaller like measuring equipment or portable electrical equipment as well. The key thing to consider that is that this equipment needs to be safe to use.
And let’s not forget again in COVID times here we need to consider what people are using at home. It’s not going to be heavy machinery that is used at home, but there will be computer equipment and perhaps other equipment.
So how do we achieve safety for this particular element? I think you have to have some sort of pre-start or regular assessment or inspection process going on for most of this equipment. Now whether that’s daily, weekly or monthly that will depend on the equipment, but there needs to be a regular approach to making sure this thing is ready to use when we start using it. Risk assessments will be important for your more hazardous machinery.
Regular servicing and preventative maintenance of course is critical to making sure that the things both work well, but also work safely. We should also be recording and maintaining our ad hoc maintenance to making sure that any unusual breakdowns are addressed promptly, and we’ve got records of these. And you know depending on the equipment you may also need to consider things like calibrations.
So, there we go. There was our quick look at the first couple of elements for the primary duty of care under the Australian work health and safety legislation for all businesses and undertakings.