Enhancing Safety‚ Health and Wellbeing

Aim

Consistently leading safe outcomes

Approach

Establish consistent application of policies, standards and procedures across the organisation and with our business partners based on effective risk management

Key Performance Indicators

Status	Level Of Achievement
Fatalities	0
Lost-time injury frequency rate	0.9
Incident rate	0.36
% of injured workers that returned to work – 13 weeks	75%
% of injured workers that returned to work – 26 weeks	100%

1. Frequency rate is (the number of LTI/Ds over the previous 12 months) * 1,000,000 divided by the number of hours worked during that 12 month period
2. Incidence rate is (the number of LTI/Ds divided by the number of employees) * 100
3. Severity rate is (the number of LTI/Ds that resulted in 60 days or more lost divided by the total number of LTI/Ds) * 100
4. Return to work within 13 weeks is (number of LTI/D with a RTW outcome within 13 weeks divided by the Number of LTI/Ds reported) * 100
5. Return to work within 26 weeks is (number of LTI/D with a RTW outcome within 26 weeks divided by Number of LTI/Ds reported) * 100

Looking Ahead

• Deployment of new EQSafe system, replacing our current manual health and safety processes and records. It will manage all events and hazards online. It also has the ability to assign and track actions of incidents, injuries, safety committee meetings, inspections and risks.
• Finalisation of a new, three-year Health, Safety and Wellbeing Action Plan to 2020
• Transition to new ISO45001 Standard for Health and Safety to be explored
• Review of existing safety, health and wellbeing documentation for predominantly low-risk office-based locations
• Continuation of addressing concerns over driving while fatigued

Our Framework

Our approach to safety, health and wellbeing is governed by our policy which applies the following principles in all that we do:

• We demonstrate safety leadership at all levels and support a culture of commitment and collaboration which actively improve work safety, health and wellbeing
• We are all responsible for safety and demand consistent performance from everyone we work with to manage all risks
• We all have the capability to exemplify positive safety, health and wellbeing standards to others in the workplace
• We recognise and consistently incorporate safety, health and wellbeing as an integral part of our business decisions and performance
• We work collaboratively to assess, review and improve our wellbeing

Our framework is structured under 12 elements that outline policies, procedures, guidelines and consultative mechanisms for staff to consistently lead safe outcomes according to occupational safety and health legislation. This framework, now just over 12 months old, forms part of our third-party certified Integrated Management System.

Key Achievements and Tracking our Performance

Safety, Health and Wellbeing Framework (Safety Management Systems)

We have continued to review and update the safety, health and wellbeing corporate procedures that support our Safety Health & Wellbeing Policy and the “12 Element” safety management framework. Arising from this has been an improved Safe Work Instruction format that focuses on ease of use by work crews and is undergoing a trial in the Kimberley Region. It is hoped this will lead to an agency wide roll-out over the next 12 months. This along with other work on improving the framework will occur in the year ahead.

Developing a New Three-Year Safety Health and Wellbeing Action Plan

The year ahead continues the third instalment of our Safety Health & Wellbeing Three-Year Action Plan taking us through to 2020. The new Action Plan will build upon successes of the last 12 months achievements. Three key initiatives are described below.

AS/NZS 4801:2001 OS&H Management System

Main Roads has again achieved recertification to Australian Standard 4801:2001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System, following an annual Integrated Management System audit (external audit) completed in April 2017. There were no major non-conformances identified during the audit. For our certified management system into the future, we are following progress on the new ISO 45001 Standard and preparing to transition to adoption when it becomes available.

Proactive Safety, Health and Wellbeing

The most notable health campaign was our “Main Roads Highway to Health Challenge” where employees and contractors were challenged to form teams of three and earn points by competing in steps taken, plus health and exercise challenges. There were a total of 40 teams and 123 participants in the challenge, with the top five teams doing a total of close to 12 million steps. To be precise: 11,880,535 steps or the equivalent of 9,053 kilometres over 2 months.

Our proactive approach to safety, health and wellbeing continues, including promoting our annual state-wide health and wellbeing program which is available all year. This includes flu vaccinations, skin screenings, workstation ergonomic reviews, along with exercise campaigns that had some staff participating in Corporate Sports, the City to Surf fun run and the HBF Run for a Reason.

New, Efficient Approach to Information

We have elected to name our new software system ‘EQSafe’, and launched a pilot in May 2017 with a full go-live planned for July 2017. This new off-the-shelf package will record and manage safety, health and wellbeing (SHW) events including hazards and incidents and associated performance reporting. Having previously managed safety through a combination of documents, spreadsheets, emails, registers and a series of forms listed on a safety intranet page, we had gone to tender in 2015 to find a new software solution to improve management of workplace SHW. As we scoped out the system we realised it would also assist managing and tracking other activities within the Integrated Management System and have since decided to incorporate tracking of environment and quality within the new system.

The new system will also lead to improvements in how we capture and report on our lead and lag indicators and will enable us to review trends more efficiently. As the system matures we will seek to procure and deploy the EQSafe mobile application making the system accessible to workers in the field and remote areas enabling our employees to report safety events as they happen.

Lost-Time Injuries

We have continued to see a significant improvement of our lost-time injury frequency rates (LTIFR) over the past three years

The following graph illustrates the LTIFR performance over the past 12 months

LTI-FR is: (the number of LTI/Ds over the 12 months x 1,000,000) divided by the number of exposure hours worked during that 12 month period. Contractor LTI’s and exposure hours are included in the Main Roads LTI-FR calculation

Workers’ Compensation and Injury Management

Injury prevention and effective injury management continue to be a key focus of our SHW Strategy. Following the principle of early return-to-work (RTW) we achieved a 9 percent reduction of workers compensation claims and improved the claim closure rates.

Of ten workers’ compensation claims lodged in the year, one claim was declined, one claim was a retrospective asbestos claim, there were two hearing loss claims and the remaining six claims were for workplace injuries. Of the six workplace injury claims, two workers incurred nil lost time, three were able to return to full-time duties within 13-weeks (on a return to work plans) and one returned to full time duties within 26 weeks, also via a return-to-work plan.