Managing Work Health and Safety Risks: A Practical Framework

About this course.

What this course covers. Building and construction work is consistently one of the highest-risk industries in Australia. Falls from height, being hit by moving plant, structural collapse, electrocution, and exposure to hazardous substances such as silica dust and asbestos all recur year after year. The good news is that the law does not ask you to guess your way through this. It asks you to follow a structured, defensible process for finding hazards and dealing with them before they hurt anyone. This course walks through that process step by step and shows how it applies to real site hazards.

The framework is drawn from the model WHS laws developed by Safe Work Australia and, in particular, the model Code of Practice titled How to manage work health and safety risks . That Code describes a systematic approach that most Australian jurisdictions have adopted in broadly similar form. It is important to understand from the outset that Safe Work Australia is a national policy body that writes the model laws; it does not enforce them. Each state and territory enacts its own WHS legislation and enforces it through its own regulator. Two jurisdictions differ more noticeably: Victoria has not adopted the model WHS laws at all and instead operates under its own Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Act 2004 and OHS Regulations, enforced by WorkSafe Victoria, while Western Australia adopted the model WHS laws more recently than the eastern states. Because of this, every duty described in this course must be checked against the law of the jurisdiction where your work is carried out.