Keeping Healthy and Safe While Working on the Road
Recently WorkSafe and Waka Kotahi created a guide, focused on keeping those that work on the road or roadside, healthy and safe. The guide encourages more comprehensive health and safety for companies working on the roads.
The Good Practice Guide is broken down into a number of key sections including:
- Risk Management
- Hazards
- Mental Wellbeing and Health Monitoring
- Worker Facilities
- Personal Protective Equipment
- Training, Certificates and Competency and
- Inductions
The guidelines cover all work being doing on a road or roadside. Examples of such work are shown in the Figure 1 of the guide.
After reviewing the guide, Logan Dawson, Managing Director of Road Safe had this to say:
“After reading through the Work Safe “Keeping healthy and safe while working on the road or roadside” guide, I really thought that this is a great foundation for the industries who undertake works on the road or roadside. I found this as well, very comprehensive, thought provoking and a good document to refer to, to help improve the working environment of our teams in the field.
At Road Safe, we do undertake a lot of this already, however we are constantly looking for ways to improve areas of our business, and our people are a key fundamental to everything we do. I have found areas that we can pull from, out of this guideline to help our teams succeed more.
Risk management is a key part to safety and there’s a tremendous amount of varying ways businesses are achieving this. For smaller companies who don’t have the health & safety managers, this document enables a clear guideline for them to use, relative to the environment. I often find with newer companies or smaller companies that don’t regularly work on the roads are really not aware of certain corridor requirements, for example working railway lines. It’s great to see this stuff documented in one place.
It’s useful they have added a section on Managing Risk through the Contracting Chain and Overlapping Duties as this is the area where there can be some varying levels of health and safety implementation, depending on who is involved and being clear on which party has responsibility for what.”
Our teams at Road Safe endeavour to use good practise guidelines, we look forward to seeing this roll out and help all the different industries that work on Roads or Roadsides move towards consistent good practise’s, and a better understanding.
To see the full guide visit https://www.worksafe.govt.nz/topic-and-industry/road-and-roadside/keeping-healthy-safe-working-road-or-roadside/
If you’ve got a project and you need professional, reliable, compliant traffic management that follows best practice, please get in touch today.