At the HASANZ 2018 Conference Wendi Croft introduced WorksafeNZ’s new guidelines for Health and Safety by Design: An Introduction. If you check out her LinkedIn profile you’ll see she’s worked in ‘rail, road, airside, water, wastewater, environmental remediation and contamination, building construction, industrial energy (thermal, nuclear, hydro), manufacturing, agriculture, power transmission and distribution, forestry and oil and gas.’ More importantly, she’s now sitting at the top table at Fletcher Building as the Chief Health and Safety Officer and is Chair, CCG Safety in Design Industry Steering Group NZ.
Croft’s key message during her workshop was the effective input of everyone on the supply chain (Client, Designer, Manufacturer, Supplier and End User) helps drive safer design., and ‘good design from early on = safer, more effective outcomes.’
What’s the problem?
Based on the data Croft presented, design failures in the UK and Australia:
- Can be attributed to up to 60% of all incidents (depending on the year).
- Tend to involve plant and machinery (not structures)
- Usually significant contributor to the SEVERITY of outcome
Also, safety in design has been covered off under HSWA 2015 and there are sections that define the designers, manufacturers, importers, suppliers and installers plant and structures duties. Specifically see Section 39: The designer must give to each person who is provided with the design info regarding—
- the purpose for which it was designed; and
- the results of any calculations, analysis, testing, or examination
- any conditions necessary to ensure that it is without risks to health and safety when used for a purpose for which it was designed or when carrying out any activity
What’s in the new Health and Safety by Design Guidelines?
The Guidelines are applicable to everyone involved in designing structures, plant or substances. Under the guidelines, a designer “means any person who prepares or modifies a design, or arranges for or instructs a person under their control to do so. Examples of designers could include, but are not limited to, architects, industrial designers, engineers and software designers.”
What are the benefits of health and safety by design?
Smart design processes can:
- Significantly reduce work-related ill-health and injuries
- Reduce damage to property and the environment
- Save money as retrofitting health and safety solutions, or using things like PPE or RPE gets expensive
- Improve usability of assets, systems and facilities
- Improve productivity
- Reduce life cycle costs and enable the prediction of operational costs
- Ensure compliance with legislation
- Increase innovation
What are the key elements of health and safety by design?
- People
- Knowledge and Capability (this includes knowledge of technical design standards and risk management processes)
- Consultation and Collaboration (for everyone in the supply chain)
- Risk
- Consider the full lifecycle from concept to decommissioning and disposal
- General Risk Management processes (Think HAZOP/HAZID/FMEA, Peer Reviews, and TESTING)
- Quality
- Documentation and communication
- Frequent monitoring and review
- Change management process
Your safety by design challenge
This week, have a look at your who your suppliers are, and what your approach is to purchasing or upgrading plant or structures. Then ask yourself if the proposed change will:
- Challenge the safe design envelope?
- Introduce new risks?
- Affect our risk mitigation controls (think is your current ‘eliminate’ or ‘minimise’ strategies enough?)
- Require our risk register to be updated?
- Increase schedule pressure, which may compromise the quality of deliverables?
- Impact on our standard in-house operating procedures or workplace methodologies?
- Require changes to work practices, such as moving to an outsourced model for maintenance, engineering or project management?
- Require changes to our organisational structures?
The big bonus is that getting curious and asking these questions can lead to downstream business innovations and efficiencies that you’ve never thought of before, that reach far beyond the boundaries of safety by design.
Have a safe and productive week,
SB