INDUSTRY BEHAVIOUR CHANGES
WORK HEALTH AND SAFETY
MAJOR CHALLENGES OF BEHAVIOUR CHANGE IN THE BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY Omesh Jethwani, Government Projects & Programs ms Manager in-conversation with Skye Buatava, Director at Centre for Work Health and Safety on the major challenges of behaviour change in the Building and Construction Industry.
You have quite an impressive resume. You have held positions with Qantas, AAPT and SafeWork NSW. How did you come to take on the role of Director at Centre for Work Health and Safety (WHS)?
What are the main core functions of the Centre for WHS?
It is not a typical path to setting up a research centre. My work history is diverse, spans multiple industries and many dissimilar roles. I think this is what helped create something different in the Centre for WHS.
I see our role within SafeWork NSW as being the catalyst for change by gaining new insights, knowledge and a more acute understanding of the issues out there.
Immediately before taking on the role at the Centre for WHS, I was the Manager of the Engineering team at SafeWork NSW. This indepth involvement with industry and workers, while at the forefront of regulation provided an avenue for seeing a greater opportunity to use evidence to inform smarter approaches in the prevention of harm and better regulation. My experience could see the critical need for workers, business and all involved in the practices we were trying to impact to be part of that evidence base. A mix of this and, right place, right time led me to the Centre.
Our core function is research into work health and safety harm and how to prevent these. But simply, the goal is to assist in the overall mission to minimise harm in the workplace.
What this does, at least what we are striving to accomplish, is to make SafeWork NSW a better prepared regulator, through that increase the increased intelligence that comes with research and its findings which will then assist our ability to achieve that overarching goal of preventing harm. To go a step further and explain how we accomplish that, the Centre works closely with our network, partnerships with individual academics and universities, business, other government, non-government agencies like yours, and community participation that spearhead our research projects. You can have good and bad research, but
it’s that key difference through partnerships, that allows a more robust and practically focused approach to research. This delivers the invaluable insights, increased knowledge and the better understanding of issues, trends both now and into the future, changing environments and even emerging risks in WHS. An important caveat is research itself won’t automatically lead to a decrease in incidents in the workplace. It is our other core functions that proceed with the lessons from research. One of those is enabling the community too, in a sense use what we have learned to make workplaces safer. We aim to achieve this by promoting innovative harm prevention strategies, new perspectives and smarter approaches to WHS issues something only made possible by doing research. Not stopping there, we also give workers and businesses new tools, up to date knowledge and the information, again from our research and findings, to meet their obligations be that employers or employees. Our hope is NSW won’t just do what’s required under the legislation but go above and beyond. Issue Two | April-June 2020 | MBA NSW
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