Excelling in Work Health and Safety

Darryn Capes-DavisEngineer, Innovation

Just over two years ago Children’s Medical Research Institute was awarded the Western Sydney Annual Business Excellence Award for Excellence in Work, Health & Safety. I am proud to lead the team that manages Operational safety at the institute and have been working for many years on transformative programs to make WHS be part of the everyday culture.

Some highlights of what we have achieved in recent times

  • Implemented an electronic controlled document framework to bring a standard template structure to policies, standard operating procedures and risk assessment.
  • Implemented an electronic incident reporting system including standard workflow to safety stakeholders in the institute. This has increased reporting by 100% as well as allowed improved reporting of 'near misses'.
  • Increase safety training compliance to a high 85% by moving to an online training system (Mindflash) which incorporates the institutes 'Training Passport'
  • Implement a simple barcode scanning system for safety seminar attendance tracking. Barcodes are included on staff access control cards. A cost effective hand held barcode scanner is used for scanning staff attendance. Bespoke software is used to generated attended and non-attended lists through reconciliation to staff records.

Since winning the award I have also implemented the following

Much of the kudos for writing the safety content goes to Amanda Capes-Davis. Together we have published a 4-part raining series on Work Health and Safety. We are active in presenting this training series to 4th year University of Sydney medical research students studying at Westmead. We have given this training twice and have been asked back to present again during 1st semester 2019.

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