Friday, March 29, 2024

Keeping you and your team healthy and safe

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In 2014 155,451 days of work were lost to injury on New Zealand dairy farms.
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That cost dairying businesses upwards of $31.7 million in one year.

Across NZ businesses, farming has the highest number of accidents and deaths and dairy farming contributes more than its fair share.

And these statistics don’t take into account our emotional or physical health.

Research shows more than half of farmers have high blood pressure, four out of 10 have trouble sleeping and the same number are concerned about the impact of stress and burnout. The emotional and financial toll of these factors is more than significant.

The Wellness, Wellbeing, Health and Safety pillar of the Sustainable Dairying: Workplace Action Plan launched in October 2015 outlines what farms could be doing in these areas to provide a quality workplace for employer and employees.

It is the central pillar, the one that is all about keeping you and your team healthy and safe, and it says:

Wellness and wellbeing are the foundations of healthy, safe and productive work and require proactive attention:

• Persons in charge of a business or undertaking (PCBUs) weigh up all of the relevant matters and circumstances and take reasonably practicable actions to manage the risks to people

• The workplace is physically safe, and emotionally secure and free from bullying

• Accommodation complies with legal requirements and is in good condition

• Adverse conditions at work, such as temperature, light, air or noise, are managed by appropriate personal protective equipment

• The nutritional, physical, emotional and social needs of vulnerable employees (eg young employees and new migrants) are addressed

• Employees are engaged in setting and operating the farm health and safety plan

• Technology, systems and processes (eg work schedules) are used to improve the quality of the workplace

• No one is permitted to work under the influence of illicit drugs or alcohol, or medication that would compromise safe work practices.

These things don’t happen by chance.

It takes a conscious decision to make sure all the pieces are in place to prevent people from being hurt or bullied. Relying on everyone ‘just doing the right thing’ doesn’t actually reduce the number of illnesses or injuries.

Investing time and thought in planning, however, does help keep people safe and it will pay dividends in productivity and to your bottom line.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. There are three key steps to managing your farm’s health and safety:

Step 1: Make a decision that planning to avoid harm is important

Step 2: Identify ways to manage risk

Step 3: Make health and safety an everyday activity

Some useful activities to get started are:

• Sit down as a team and discuss:

(a) Why do we want a safe and healthy farm?

(b) What will we do to be a safe and healthy farm?

(c) How will we make sure everyone who comes to our farm is safe?

• As a team come up with a list of behaviours you want to see on farm (eg no untrained people to drive farm vehicles, and no vehicles in the no-go zones marked in red on the farm map). Make these the basis for your farm rules.

• Identify the risks to people that exist on your farm. Think about:

(a) All the activities you do on the farm – what has gone wrong, what could go wrong?

(b) All the equipment you use on the farm – what has gone wrong, what could go wrong?

( c) The features on your farm like streams, bridges, gates etc – what could happen because of these features that you haven’t already considered?

• Go through the risks and decide:

(a) Can we eliminate the risk? If it is reasonably practicable, you must.

(b) If we can’t eliminate it, how can we effectively minimise the risk to people (changing behaviour, maintaining equipment, altering tools to make them safer, training, protective clothes).

• Go through the risks and decide:

(a) Who needs to know about this risk and how to control it?

(b) What is the best way to tell them?

• Work out when and who will update the risk register and how changes to it will be communicated to relevant people.

Having a farm where wellness, wellbeing, health and safety are obviously important and valued is about leadership more than anything.

At the core of this is a boss who wants that to happen and leads the way with their own actions, but everyone onfarm must play their own leadership role too.

The employer and all employees need to be able to say “we are doing this the healthiest and safest way we can”.

WorkSafe have developed some practical resources aimed to help you do this. Visit www.saferfarms.org.nz to find out more.

Become a friend

Learn more about the Sustainable Dairying: Workplace Action Plan by visiting www.dairynz.co.nz/WAP.

We also invite employers and employees to sign up as a friend of the plan which will direct you to information and tools that will make a practical difference onfarm and ensure you are the first to know of new initiatives we are working on.

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