Your pledge as a good Health & Safety Leader

Lasting Change

Consider for one moment the prospect of rapidly changing health care organizations. You have heard
about and perhaps even put to use Total quality management. Most people who have used Total Quality Management praise the effectiveness of this approach in making small but steady changes. But
users and critics of Total Quality Management universally agree that the approach takes too long to complete. Some abandon the approach with frustration because it is so time consuming. Now, consider what if you were able to use Total Quality management, have results, and change organizations but much faster than before. Not only a little bit faster but perhaps 20 or 30 times faster than currently

So what exactly is an environmental incident and when do you emergency report? When last did you have an environmental incident? Nothing serious you might say, just an effluent pipe overflowed for a couple of days into the receiving wetland, nothing too serious here. So how exactly do you know if you have experienced an environmental incident? The National environmental management Act (NEMA) defines an ‘incident’ as an unexpected sudden occurrence, including a major emission, fire or explosion leading to serious danger to the public or potentially serious pollution of or detriment to the environment, whether immediate or delayed. Unfortunately, there is no specific definition for ‘potentially serious pollution’ so you might have to be creative and use the potentially seriousness significance rating system? Or as a rule of thumb if the incident has the ability to pollute any resource such as soil, water or air and you are unable to stop the pollution from spreading within a short time frame, it can be considered an emergency incident.

Your pledge as a good Health & Safety Leader.

Leading by example:

Whenever we discuss health and safety we make it clear that an exemplary Health and Safety performance is our aim and that we
value the health and well-being of our workers, contractors, visitors and members of the public. Health and Safety is on the agenda of any board or management meeting and the company routinely reports our health and safety performance as part of our commitment to corporate social responsibility. Health and Safety performance is an
important element of performance reviews. Managers are responsible for the health and safety performance of their departments. We know we are able to measure our health and Safety performance
through useful and meaningful indicators. We set long-term goals for the control of major hazards and Health and Safety as we do for financial and production goals and have a plan to meet these. We meet the workforce regularly and discuss occupational health and safety with them. We are confident that contracts are awarded to companies who can demonstrate a good Health and Safety performance and who have a good understanding of the hazards they will encounter while working for us. All incidents and near misses are investigated fully to identify the underlying causes and follow up on the agreed action.