Your Obligations

The PCBU has the ‘primary duty of care’ to ensure the safety of workers and anyone affected by its work.

The PCBU must (as far as reasonably practicable):

• Provide and maintain a workplace that is without risks to health and safety.
• Provide and maintain safe plant and structures and safe systems of work.
• Ensure the safe use, handling and storage of plant, structures and substances.
• Provide adequate facilities for the welfare of workers.
• Provide information, training, instruction, or supervision that is necessary to protect all persons from risks to their health and safety arising from work.
• Monitor the health of workers and the conditions at the workplace to prevent injury or illness.

E.g. Chief Executive, board member, or director

An officer must exercise due diligence by taking reasonable steps to:

• Keep up to date about work health and safety matters.
• Understand the nature of the hazards and risks associated with the organisation's operations.
• Ensure the organisation has resources and processes to eliminate or minimise risks.
• Ensure appropriate and timely processes for receiving and responding to incidents, hazards and risks.
• Ensure there are processes for complying with any duty.
• Verify that health and safety processes are in place and being used.

E.g. Employees, contractors

A worker must exercise reasonable care by:

• Ensuring the health and safety of themselves and others in the workplace.
• Following instructions from the PCBU.
• Cooperating with health and safety policies and procedures of the PCBU.
• Workers also have the right to refuse to undertake unsafe or dangerous work.

E.g. Visitors or customers

An Other Person must exercise reasonable care by:

• Taking reasonable care of their health and safety.
• Ensuring that their acts or omissions do not adversely affect the health and safety of other persons.
• Following instructions given by the PCBU.

Check that you have policies and procedures in place for health and safety. Ideally, you will have a health and safety system in place that is regularly reviewed and communicated to everyone in your organisation.

Ensure that you have practices in place that provide workers with opportunities to participate in improving health and safety at your organisation in an ongoing basis. Get them involved - not just because you legally have to but because your workers can help improve health and safety. This might include electing Health and Safety Reps, setting up a H & S Committee, having regular safety meetings and conducting regular toolbox talks.

As the PCBU you are in the best position to control the risks in the workplace. You can do this by ensuring you have a process in place to:

1. Identify hazards
2. Assess the level of risk for each hazard
3. Control and monitor hazards.

You will need to document the above steps, including the controls you use which will include either eliminating or minimising the hazards.

Common documents/templates for managing hazards include:

• Site Specific Safety Plans (SSSPs),
• Risk/hazard registers
• Task analysis/safe work method statement (TA/SWMS), and
• Safe operating systems for plant and equipment.

Remember that these documents should be reviewed regularly.

Review your staff training and induction process. Ask yourself if all of your workers have the training and knowledge they need to be able to work safely.

If the answer is no, then ensure they are supervised or get them the training they need. Make sure you are keeping a record of your staff’s training and any new training.

Ensure you have a way of recording, investigating and reporting workplace incidents (including near-misses).

You should also be putting preventative measures in place. Check that you have an emergency plan written up for your organisation and remember that you must notify WorkSafe New Zealand of any serious incidents.