The Noggin Blog

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, safety teams have been working overtime to mitigate risk, ensure a safe work environment, all in compliance with the employer duty of care obligation. But that work won’t end even when the pandemic is over.

Indeed, PCBUs (Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking) have a legal obligation to ensure the health and safety of staff. That duty of care obligation never ends. So, how to maintain the obligation in the midst of a crisis, emergency, or other business continuity incident? 

It’s the new year, and you’ve made the commitment to build (or enhance) your safety culture. Only problem is your contractors and suppliers haven’t made the same commitment to prioritise their safety culture. Why does it matter and what can you do about it? 

With broad swaths of the economy once again open, entities involved in hazardous operations and other forms of non-routine work will need to re-implement stringent, work risk controls.

By law, those controls should go above and beyond safe work protocols for routine jobs. So how do PCBUs go about taking formalised steps to mitigate the work health and safety risks associated with dangerous jobs?

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the underreporting of accidents, injuries, illnesses, and other safety incidents loomed large as a major hurdle to improving safety performance. Since then, the pandemic has scrambled many safety priorities. But return to work shouldn’t be a return to safety underreporting. And here’s why.

It’s been a couple years since work health and safety management system standards got a global upgrade. In 2018, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 45001 came out, replacing British certification, OHSAS 18001, as the best-practice standard.

Plenty of compliance conscious PCBUs didn’t make the move then. But the British standard is only valid until the end of March 2021, meaning now is the time to upgrade. What are the other safety advantages of ISO 45001?

The imperatives of social distancing during the pandemic have created unprecedented changes to work. Foremost among them: the increased need for people to work alone or in remote arrangements.

For PCBUs (Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking), more people working alone mean more lone workers in need of a new class of safety protections, documented internal policies to keep this high-risk occupational group out of harm’s way. How to go about mitigating the risk so you don’t incur the liability?

PCBUs (Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking) in the Australian state of New South Wales woke up this month to a more aggressive safety compliance regime.

Amendments to pre-existing safety law now put employers who fail to meet health and safety obligations on the hook for stiff new penalties should their negligence lead to a worker dying on the job. Those penalties include up to 25 years in prison for individual actors. Add to that, millions in fines for companies.

After months of disruption, organizations are eager to return to normal as part of the recovery lifecycle. For many, that means resuming operations in work facilities vacated due to local, state, and national lockdown orders.

With the spread of the coronavirus, the health and safety of our workers is back in the news. Indeed, frontline workers, especially healthcare professionals, have become the faces of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic – their heroism matched only by the level of safety risk they court to do their jobs, with data sources showing a disproportionate number of healthcare workers among those infected with the coronavirus.

Frontline workers, especially healthcare professionals, have become the faces of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In areas hard hit by the rapid spread of the coronavirus, like Lombardy, New York City, and New Orleans, stories of the noble sacrifices of healthcare workers who have had to risk their personal safety to treat patients without an adequate stock of personal protective equipment (PPE) have proliferated – incomplete data sources point to at least 5,400 healthcare workers COVID-19 infections in the U.S. alone, with dozens of deaths.