This is great, thank you for sharing it. I'd be keen to check out the other toolkits.

Hey Catherine,

We have had similar issues within our workplace as well. I joined the team 18months ago to discover quite quickly that there low injury rates were actually low reporting rates and HZID's a near misses weren't even considered a thing. Part of our issue was the forms in place with a different form for each different type of safety report that could be made. So to start we streamlined the form, reduced the employee section to Name, Date, Location, brief Description and signature, then made the supervisors responsible for completing the rest (injury details etc.) This change came of course with training for all staff on the new forms with lots of emphasis on how simple and easy there were to fill out and assure staff that they would not be blamed or penalised in any way for reporting a concern. We saw a great improvement in our reporting levels in general.

This year we decided we needed to step up the hazard id and near miss (or as we call it now the "oh sh***t that was close" moments) and to help with this we put together a behaviour based safety program which has included choosing some safety champions (not elected reps but staff who believe that safety is important), weekly meetings for the new safety team, developing our own walk safe observations that we are doing each week and time on the floor talking to other staff about safety (as part of our regular meetings). We also removed the absolute requirement for forms to be filled in and chose to include walk observations, verbal feedback, photos, emails and text messages as a means of recording the damage, hazard or near miss situations.

This safety team has been in full force on our site the last 6 weeks and we've seen our damage, hazard and near miss reporting double so far. The managers freaked out a little at the increase in reports but after a robust conversation I was able to assure them that we are not any more hazardous than we were, we're just closer to capturing the true levels of safety incidents/concerns in our factory. We've also managed to improve our compliance to safety rules - mainly around the wearing of PPE which has historically been an issue for us in terms of both people safety and food safety. I think we'll need to nurse the system for a little while to make sure that it's imbedded in our site culture but it's been well worth the effort so far.

Hi Tania,

I would love to have a look at this, it sounds like an awesome idea. kimdotpryoratscalzofoodsdotcom

We have a not so secret stash of panadol on site which staff can access, it doesn't go in the first aid kit so that we have the opportunity to ask a few questions before we hand them over. Our key concern is with allergies rather than an overdose, before we dish out any we always ask if they have ever had an allergic reaction to it before and we only ever give out 2 at a time. If an operator comes back regularly asking for panadol we have a conversation with them around what the underlying causes might be and offer to send staff to our company doctor for a check-up (depending of course on the reason for needing the panadol)

Have you considered using an app on a smart phone. There is a free android app called Take 5 which you can use for a quick risk assessment. it asks basic questions, prompts for controls and when your done you can email to yourself or whoever needs it. You can also log a hazard report.

Hi Craig - I'd been keen to help, I can offer you some interview tips that might be useful and may be able to organise for you to spend some time at our site getting a feel for a manufacturing environment (I'm Auckland based). I cant do much this side of Xmas but if you'd like to flick me an email I can certainly help in the new year. kimdotpryoratscalzofoodsdotcom.