Health and safety representatives can make a huge contribution to improving health and safety at work, and helping reps do their jobs well is a key goal for Safetree and the Forest Industry Safety Council (FISC).
We’ve been working with WorkSafe and other groups on ways to ‘connect’ health and safety reps so they can learn from, and share with, each other. One idea being considered is to create a ‘virtual community’ of health and safety reps through smart use of technology.
In order to do that, we need to understand what support reps need to do their everyday health and safety work well. So WorkSafe is running a survey to find out about the experiences of health and safety reps – what’s working well for them, what are the challenges, and what support is required to help them in their roles?
I’d like to make sure the voice of forestry health and safety reps comes through loud and clear in this survey. So, I’d encourage you to pass on the survey link below to all the health and safety reps you know, or if you are a rep, to do it yourself.
The survey opened on 17 June and will stay open until 12 July. It should take about 10 minutes to complete. A report on the findings will be available in September.
Safetree’s latest performance dashboard for forestry shows a slight decline in injuries resulting in workers needing more than a week off work to recover. The number of certified contractors reach 116, and the number of certified workers 254. However, seven forestry workers lost their lives in the year ended March 2019.
This report for Q1 2019 shows a steady performance. However, it’s worth looking at the detail relating to injuries occurring during plant maintenance – one in particular relating to stored energy in a hydraulic ram, and near-hits in relation to log cartage.
Save this date: The next Safetree Conference will be held on 26th and 27th March 2020 at Shed 6, Wellington. The theme of the conference is ‘Connect for Success’. Registrations will open in October.
Rayonier Matariki has shared several safety alerts that will be relevant to other forestry operators. They include insights into how things went wrong and lessons to prevent similar incidents in future. One also includes comments about how good emergency procedures prevented an injury becoming more serious.
One of the incidents involved a stem entering a processor cab. This resulted in damage exceeding $50k, but thankfully the operator walked away with only a bruised arm. Thanks to Rayonier Matariki for sharing these alerts.
If you have other safety alerts please send them to info@safetree.nz and we’ll share them.
Leave a Reply