S A F E T Y
JIM SAYS: HAPPINESS IS A
HIGH-SCORING SAFETY AUDIT
Jim Bell knows too well how
badly things can go wrong
in the workplace. He’s been
a safety advisor and auditor
for Site Safe since 2006 but for
well before then he was with the
Department of Labour as a factory
inspector.
He’s seen the aftermath of
accidents and deaths in workplaces
and it’s given him a very healthy
regard for health and safety. He
started with the DOL, the precursor
to WorkSafe, in Auckland in 1976.
The training was good, but the
accidents he had to investigate
were grim. “The police would always
say to me: ‘Do you want to see the
body?’ I always said: No thanks.
“The police always seemed immune
to the shock value. But if you saw
the body, say someone fell in an
electroplating bath, oh, it was
terrible. “You never get use to it. Well,
I never did. At all.”
That’s why he takes the safety
audits he does for Site Safe very
seriously. He is one of Site Safe’s
experts whose role is to inspect an
organisation’s health and safety
operations against a standard set of
criteria and writes a report, giving a
mark out of a hundred. He says this
gives an organisation a benchmark
that helps them measure
themselves over time, and against
the rest of their industry.
He says benchmarking picks out
areas a firm can perform better in,
and highlights where it is doing well.
“If someone’s coming in at 80 per
cent in their audit, and everybody
else is getting 90, they know they
need to go and have a look at their
operations. That seems to be a
big plus.”
The key parts of a Site Safe audit
involve:
• Checking health and safety
documentation
• Personal protective equipment
(PPE)
• Emergency procedures
• Site set up and equipment use.
Jim has a solid background in
industry. He was an engineering
tradesman in Glasgow and moved
to New Zealand in 1970. He
worked on the construction of the
Tiwai Point aluminium smelter and
then the glassworks in Penrose
before joining the Department of
Labour as a trainee inspector.
When he started as an auditor,
he says personal protective
equipment (PPE) could be a bit lax.
In fact, jandals were the protective
footwear of choice in some
places. “Now it’s not a problem,”
he says.
Documentation has also improved
- 12 years ago it was almost nonexistent
in many places.
“It’s generally good now. If
there’s six subcontractors on
site, three or four of them will be
pretty good and just two will need
a bit of tweaking.” He says where
companies aren’t doing so well is
adapting quickly to new legislation.
An example of this is how some of
them are dragging the chain when
it comes to risk assessments and
hazardous substances inventories.
And often, he says, the investigation
of an incident often doesn’t include
the root cause of the accident.
While the Health and Safety at Work
Act has been around a couple of
years now, many people aren’t fully
compliant. They almost seem to be
wanting to see what other people do
wrong, Jim says. “People want more
information from WorkSafe, they
want more prosecutions, but not
themselves of course!”
A bugbear with Jim is getting hazard
reporting done properly, especially
when he notices non-compliance
issues. These can range from
people using a ladder incorrectly to
not wearing eye protection or things
like working on scaffolding with
guard rails missing, “I say to them,
‘why don’t you report/tell each other
about these things so they can be
avoided in future?’ A lot of the time
they’ll just shrug. “Worker education
and management education, we
need to do more work there.”