Raising the bar
Author: Paul Allott
Raising the bar
Paul Allott
31 October 2015
Executive Summary
The introduction of the new Health and Safety at Work Act will be one of the most significant changes in workplace health and safety in the past 20 years. At the time of completing this project, the Health and Safety Reform Bill is currently before Parliament. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee has considered the Bill and public submissions and reported back to Parliament with improvements.
Worksafe New Zealand (the new health and safety agency set up by Government) states, “On average, 73 people per year die on the job, 1 in 10 is harmed and 600-900 die from work-related diseases – all coming at a cost of $3.5 billion per year. And that doesn’t count for the social and psychological costs on the friends, family, loved ones and co-workers of those people hurt on the job”.
This research project is ultimately driven by a desire for New Zealanders’ to go to work with an expectation that they will return home safely to their families. Communication – the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing or using some other medium (Oxford Dictionary). Risk communication is an important factor in organisational risk management and when information isn’t fully communicated to those who need it, it can lose its value. This project attempts to explore whether risk communication is effective in motivating individuals to carry out risk directed behaviour.
Key words: Health and Safety; Health and Safety at Work Act 2015; Risk communication; Risk behaviour.
Paul Allott's thesis was supervised by Malcolm MacPherson.
Licence
This thesis is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
