An external audit of the Gatton Shire Council’s Health and Safety Management System in August 2002 gave Council a benchmark of where it was in regard to workplace health and safety.
“We found that we had a lot of improvements to make,” said Workplace Health and Safety Officer (WH&S), Sue Mischke. “The Action Plan which was developed following the audit was our turning point. It provided us with a tangible list of exactly what we needed to do.”
As part of the overhaul, Council looked at how it could improve consultation and communication across the organisation on health and safety issues.
“We put noticeboards in each permanent workplace which were specifically for health and safety issues and notices,” Sue Mischke said. “We also increased our WH&S representatives to ensure that each work unit of Council was represented. We changed the structure of formal meetings by introducing subcommittees to deal with operational issues and changed the Management Committee’s focus to a strategic one.”
A regular staff newsletter has a strong health and safety focus and includes a Safety Quiz competition with prizes attached.
“We are fortunate that our staff have taken the initiative and have been proactive in introducing improved methods for eliminating or minimising safety risks,” Sue Mischke said.
“An example is the placing of signage to identify confined spaces. From their own initiative our staff not only arranged for signs to be put up, they included details of the type of equipment in the space and allocated an identification number to each which corresponds to the Confined Space Register.
“Management support has been welcomed and is an essential element in any successful health and safety system. Their involvement has ensured that we have come a long way towards achieving our aim to develop a safety culture where workplace health and safety becomes part of the way we do business.”
To complete the story, in August 2003 Gatton Council was one of ten Councils in Queensland to be audited as part of a State self-insurance scheme.
Council received excellent comment from the external auditor who indicated that Gatton was the benchmark of those Councils audited.
