The Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy will provide the national framework to support change and improvement at the workplace level from 2012 to 2022. Safe Work Australia is currently developing the strategy and a draft was available for public comment from 26 March to 21 May 2012.
Strategic themes
In March 2011, the Members of Safe Work Australia spent a day exploring the key themes and structure for the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy. Some suggestions made by Safe Work Australia Members for the new Strategy are as follows:
- focusing on work health and safety prevention
- engaging target groups and industries to ensure advice and support is relevant to enable them to
- effectively respond to hazards
- engineering hazards out through good design
- influencing the supply chain inside and outside Australia
- prioritising key work health and safety hazards and focusing national attention
- creating opportunities for innovation in work health and safety particularly within the regulatory framework
- enhancing the culture of safety leadership (promoting highly reliable organisations)
- emphasising the importance of safety culture
- enhancing the capability of workers to return to work following accident or illness
- influencing or assisting academia to undertake research—focusing on intervention effectiveness, and
- developing a shared communication strategy to promote the principles of the new strategy.
Consultation process
Safe Work Australia has been working with a range of stakeholders to develop the new Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy. A key element of the consultation process has been the series of 11 workshops which were held around Australia between May and September 2011. These workshops focused on a number of topics relevant to the development of the new strategy, including:
- work health and safety developments over the next decade—what success will look like, and how we will get there
- social, economic, and emerging issues in the workforce, business and in technology that may impact on work health and safety
- hazards and controls—the capacity of workplaces to respond to disease causing hazards, injury causing hazards and psychological injury causing hazards, and
work health and safety systems—challenges and solutions in safe design and work systems, the supply chain, skills and training, and in safety leadership and organisational cultures.
Safe Work Australia has taken the feedback from this consultation process into account and used it to prepare a draft of the new strategy. The draft strategy sets the strategic direction for work health and safety, suggest how targets should be set and shows how these targets can be reached.
www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au
