DOSHS Safety Committee Exam case studies
DOSHS Safety Committee Exam · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The DOSHS Safety Committee Examination is a Kenyan assessment for people who serve on, or intend to serve on, workplace safety and health committees under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, 2007 and its subsidiary legislation. It suits safety committee members and secretaries, safety officers, union safety representatives, supervisors and HR or compliance staff who need to show they understand how a committee is constituted, what it is legally expected to do, and how its members identify hazards, inspect workplaces, investigate incidents and keep records. The DOSHS Safety Committee Exam case studies are 5 cases and about 5,014 words.
1Case 1 - The Watamu hotel committee that has no workers on it
Sunrise Bay Hotel in Watamu employs 96 people across three shifts - housekeeping, kitchen, laundry, security and front office. After a DOSHS inspector issued an improvement notice following a slip in the laundry, the general manager formed a “safety committee” of five people: himself as chairperson, the human resource manager, the security supervisor, the maintenance technician and the head chef.
953 words, about 5 min2Case 2 - Prioritising hazards in a Nairobi steel fabrication workshop
A steel fabrication workshop in Nairobi’s light industrial area employs 34 workers, including three welders who each work a full eight-hour shift. Personal noise measurements taken last month give 96 dB(A) Lep,d for the welders; the angle grinder is the main source.
989 words, about 5 min3Case 3 - A three-day injury, a re-planked scaffold and a decision not to report
On a four-storey building site in Kisumu, a 28-year-old steel fixer fell about 2.4 m from a working platform on a scaffold when a plank shifted under him. He landed on rubble, fractured his left wrist and was taken to a private clinic.
1,025 words, about 5 min4Case 4 - Two spray painters, a curtained corner and asthma
A vehicle body shop in Thika employs twelve people, two of whom spray-paint cars with a two-pack paint whose hardener contains an isocyanate and whose thinner is a solvent mixture. The “booth” is a curtained corner of the workshop with a homemade fan that extracts into the yard; when it is switched on, paint mist drifts back into the preparation area, where two other workers sand body panels.
1,017 words, about 5 min5Case 5 - 750 garment workers, one usable stair and a bell nobody can hear
A six-storey garment factory in Ruaraka employs 750 people, most of them on sewing machines in two halls on floors three and four. The building has two staircases, but the one at the rear has been stacked chest-high with bales of denim for the last four months.
1,030 words, about 5 min