Health, Safety and Occupational Welfare
This domain tests your duties for your own safety and that of colleagues, and the legal framework behind them.
Legal frame
- The Occupational Safety and Health Act, 2007 (OSHA) requires employers to provide safe plant and systems of work, risk assessment, training, protective equipment, first aid and fire precautions, and requires employees to use equipment properly, report hazards and not endanger others. The Directorate of Occupational Safety and Health Services enforces it.
- The Work Injury Benefits Act, 2007 covers compensation for work-related injury.
- The Employment Act, 2007 sets basic terms: hours, rest days, leave, sick leave and wages.
Core practice
- Risk assessment: identify the hazard, who may be harmed, likelihood and severity, controls, then review.
- Hierarchy of control: eliminate, substitute, engineer, administrate, and use personal protective equipment last.
- PPE must be issued, inspected and replaced: helmet, boots, gloves, hi-vis, body armour where provided.
- Welfare on post: drinking water, toilets, rest breaks, shade at static posts, shelter from rain.
- Fatigue from long night shifts and double shifts is a major cause of poor decisions and accidents. Report unsafe rostering.
- Report accidents and near misses in writing and in the accident book.
- Report harassment, stress and substance problems to a supervisor or welfare line.
Worked example
A guard on a twelve-hour night post has no shelter and is falling asleep. Discipline alone misses the point. Do the risk assessment: the control is a sheltered, lit post with a chair and a rota with breaks. Record the hazard and escalate to the supervisor. Fatigue is a management failure as much as an individual one.
Traps
Treating PPE as the first control rather than the last; hiding a near miss; assuming OSHA applies only to factories; ignoring stress and fatigue until an accident happens.