Inside Section 2
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The Health and Safety in Employment (HSE) Act was introduced in 1992 and became law on 1 April 1993.  It has been since amended twice – initially in 1998 and subsequently in 2002.  One primary reason for changing the HSE Act was due to the rising costs associated with injuries, illness and deaths that occur in New Zealand. From 2000-2007 there have been 483 on the job fatalities or on average a person dies at work every 4 days. ACC on their website have slightly different figures for the same period which is 633 work related deaths. Both ACC and the DoL have also stated that every day 3 people die from work related illness or injuries.

We also average 7.6 workers injured per 100,000 that are off work for more than 60 days – Australia averages 4.2 per 100,000 workers.

The top 3 workplace-related injuries are:

Top 3 workplace-related illnesses are:

The HSE Act does not set out to instruct and dictate how to make your particular place of work safe and healthy. If you consider that the Act as PERFORMANCED BASED – that is, it requires employers and others to show they have done something (performed) such as having a systematic approach for the identification of hazards, or drawing on the information and procedures used in Regulations, Codes of Practice, and Best Practice Guidelines, as well as from their workforce and specialist OSH personnel.

TRAINZ can assist by designing a Health and Safety Management system to meet your legal requirement while insuring that systems are easy to use so that those at the coal face will complete documentation so that both the Employer and Employees meet their legal obligations and everybody as taken all reasonably practicable steps to make work safe.

Remember that "All Practicable Steps" means what can reasonably be expected given the circumstances, state of knowledge, resources etc. You don’t have to deal with things that you couldn’t possibly have known about or control - However you if your opposition / competition has systems in place the DoL tend to measure against THAT standard asking " if they did ....., why didn't you?"

If you would like a FREE copy of a very simple Health and Safety management system provided by DoL please download from the SOP page. If you would like TRAINZ to assist in developing systems that meets ACC's Workplace Safety Management Practices (WSMP) please contact our team.