Health, Wellness and Safe Workplace
Prevention first
Occupational health and safety rests on the internal responsibility system: employers and workers jointly own safety, and the employer must show due diligence, meaning reasonable steps to identify and control hazards. The core cycle is hazard identification, risk assessment (likelihood times severity), control and review. The hierarchy of controls runs from most to least effective: elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls, then personal protective equipment. PPE ranks last because it depends on human behaviour and protects one person at a time.
Programs
Know incident investigation and reporting duties, joint health and safety committees, and the three worker rights: to know, to participate and to refuse unsafe work. Add workers' compensation (no-fault, employer-funded, with return-to-work obligations), disability management, and psychological health and safety, including psychosocial risk factors, harassment and violence prevention, and Westray-style criminal liability for organizations and supervisors.
Traps
- Reversing the hierarchy of controls; providing gloves is never the best first answer.
- Confusing an incident (near miss, no harm) with an accident (harm occurred).
- Treating wellness as purely physical; psychosocial risk is examinable.
- Assuming accommodation and safety conflict; undue hardship is the limit, not the first resort.
- Missing reporting deadlines or failing to investigate, classic due-diligence failures.
Worked example
A hazard with likelihood 4 of 5 and severity 5 scores 20, which is high risk. Try to eliminate the task, otherwise engineer a guard, and train and post signage only after higher-order controls are in place. Rule of thumb: the further up the hierarchy you move, the less the outcome depends on people behaving perfectly at 3 a.m.