Safe Work Practices and Safe Work Procedures

In our next Quarterly Newsletter, we have a section discussing Safe Work Practices and Safe Work Procedures.

According to Ontario’s Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) employers in Ontario are responsible for many, indeed most, aspects of workplace safety. These responsibilities include ensuring the existence and implementation of safe work practices and safe work procedures:

 

Safe work practices are “generally written methods that outline how to perform a task with the minimum risk to people, equipment, materials, environment, and processes.”

 

Safe work procedures “outline a step by step process for the worker to complete the task with minimal level of risk. These steps are listed in chronological order to best minimize the exposure to potential risk for the worker.” (1)

 

Our customers also often use the phrase safe work instructions too, which implies the integration of safe work practices into safe work procedures in respect to a particular assignment and objective.

Tundra Rescue develops safe work procedures for every task that we do. These may be relatively generic, if for example it is for a frequent task or if the task is similar to things we regularly do, and/or involving a regular client or worksite.

However sometimes, if the task is unusual or more complex, those procedures may involve a significant amount of pre-site development work involving our technical experts, health and safety staff, operations and administrative managers.

Our customer representatives are involved in this too of course, because finding a way to safety achieve their project and program objectives becomes our objective too.

In fact, we can say that we enjoy that break from the routine when we are given a chance to think creatively about an access methodology, whether at height or in a confined space, that is a bit different from our normal work.

Recent examples of this include:

• the retrieval of an expensive analytical device lost in a wastewater tunnel,
• supporting a client that was using a particularly hazardous chemical in a confined space, and,
• the removal of a sign from a difficult access area where the next option if we had failed would have been the use of a helicopter, at vast expense.

 

If you are a customer or potential customer and feeling you need support figuring out your Safe Work Practices or Safe Work Procedures, particularly for a task that involves access challenges (heights, depths and confined spaces) please do get in touch for a free initial consultation to see if we can find a way to help you do what you need to get done.

 

(1) IHSA Resources