Dry sandblasting, grinding, cutting, sanding, polishing, and drilling of silica-containing materials like concrete, rock, glass, asphalt, cement and engineered stone are considered hazardous tasks in construction. This is because you create silica dust that is too small to settle that floats around undetected in the air that can be breathed in by you and those around you.
The tiny silica dust particles can penetrate your respirator if you aren’t careful. Make sure your respirator has been fit-tested and isn’t worn over a beard. You must also have the correct filters, as Silica dust is 100 times smaller than sand and can penetrate some filters.
Step 1: Understand what happens when you inhale silica dust.
Step 2: Know the silica content of your construction materials and substitute for less hazardous materials!
Damage to the lungs from silica dust and symptoms of disease may not appear for many years. Workers may not show any symptoms, even at the point of initial diagnosis, which is why prevention and health monitoring is critical. Often workers are diagnosed during routine health monitoring, as chest X-rays may show scar tissue formation even if you are without symptoms. Silicosis symptoms may include a dry cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, fever, chest pain, and unexplained weight loss. Silicosis also increases your risk for other conditions like lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, kidney disease, and some auto-immune diseases.
Tell your doctor about your current or previous exposure to silica dust. To rule out silicosis, respiratory questionnaires, lung function tests, chest X-rays, and CT scans may be required.
Early detection of silicosis, before symptoms develop, can motivate you to stop further exposure, and improve your health outcome.
If you were exposed to silica dust currently or in the past, even if you wore respirators and even if you have no symptoms, you need routine health monitoring. Talk to your employer. Tell your doctor about your exposure. Engineered stone workers must see specialist occupational health doctors. Early detection is most important!
It is important to understand that there are very likely specific requirements you need to meet to ensure you are appropriately managing the risks. WorkSafe has plenty of information available to learn more. We have provided a few key links below for you:
You can also contact our friendly team if you have any questions.
Construction, agricultural, horticultural, or manufacturing, no matter what industry you’re in electrical equipment will be present. To ensure your electrical equipment is safe and in good condition you should do daily inspections before use and your equipment testing and tagging should be done.
Testing and tagging is checking the safety of portable electrical appliances that get used in the workplace.
It involves two steps: Visually inspecting the appliance for any noticeable damage,
And secondly, electrically testing it with a Portable Appliance Tester (PAT). Once tested and approved, a tag is attached with the following information:
Testing and tagging helps identify any faults or damage in the equipment that could potentially cause harm to individuals or the workplace. If tested appliances are found to be non-compliant or unsafe, they must be labeled accordingly and withdrawn from use immediately.
Anyone with the knowledge, skills, tools, and understanding of the standards involved can conduct testing and tagging. If the testing reveals any issues or something needs fixing then a registered electrical worker will be required.
In short, basically any electrical corded power tool or device. This includes any device or appliance that has a flexible cable, and a removable plug, and also includes both single and three-phase connections. This applies to new equipment before it is used, and also needs to be carried out on second-hand appliances intended for sale.
Keeping you and your workmates safe at work is a priority, so make sure you are aware of the businesses testing and tagging requirements in the workplace.
The HazardCo App site review resource has a list of electrical controls that should be in place to minimise the risk of electrical hazards.
If you have any questions get in touch with the HazardCo Team
According to WorkSafe NZ, a near miss is defined as an incident that occurs but doesn’t lead to injury, illness, or damage.
No matter what working environment you are in, work sites nationwide have near misses every day. On-site, a near miss could be tripping over stacked material, it could be dropping the hammer off the scaffold onto the ground or backing the truck and narrowly missing the boss’s ute. While these seem fairly innocent, they could have been more serious.
Like other incidents, these near misses need to be recorded and reported as soon as they occur. Once they have been, you can look into what caused the near-miss and put steps in place to avoid it turning into something more serious.
Near misses should be considered the same as an incident. But often they aren’t.
We often find that near misses are very rarely reported, and actually brushed off. Near misses are just as dangerous as actual incidents. If you’ve had a near miss, you might have got lucky but someone else might not. Treat near misses as a free learning tool to put controls in place to prevent more serious incidents from occurring.
By encouraging near miss reporting, you can start to see patterns and gain valuable insights on where to best focus resources into safety.
Reporting all near misses and incidents on-site, is all about helping to prevent harm. Everyone on-site has a right to know of potential threats that may impact them, and everyone plays a role in keeping everyone safe on-site.
Getting everyone to report near misses and incidents creates a culture of open, honest discussions about health and safety.
Best practice is that all incidents, whether they cause injury or not, need to be reported and added to your incident register.
The more reporting you have, the more data is available for those in a position to influence change, as it can help them to see areas that require improvement or to see how effective implemented controls have been.
No matter how big or small, report all near misses and incidents so you can all learn from them. Using the Report Incident feature on your HazardCo App, fill out the fields to capture what happened. Your reported incident will be added to your incident register in the Hub, and HazardCo retains this for as long as you’re a member.
Ensure you take incidents and near misses seriously and investigate them. Investigations help you work out the root cause so you can put corrective actions in place to prevent a recurrence.
We all dread an incident occurring, but if anything serious happens on your site it’s important you are prepared, remain calm, and do the right thing. When in doubt, call HazardCo – we are here to support the health and safety needs of all HazardCo members 24/7. If you’d like to learn more about the App and the Reporting Incident tool take a look at our short demo videos
A total of 1029 incidents have been notified to HazardCo so far this year – 276 of these were finger and hand related. Given the frequency, we want to look at the impact of these injuries and how to manage them better.
There are a fair few ways these occur on-site. The most common include:
The causes are often the result of equipment malfunctions, falling objects, compression between objects, electrical faults, and worker errors.
Hand tools are a huge contributor to hand related injuries in the workplace. When using these common tools, hammers, hand saws, pliers, angle grinders etc fatigue, rushing, complacency, using faulty or damaged tools or a lack of training often leads to workers injuring themselves
The long-term impact of a hand injury ranges from minor to severe. A minor injury could mean changes in grip strength and reduced range of motion of the fingers. In more serious cases, a worker may lose the ability to use their hand.
Awareness is everything. You can educate your staff in the following ways:
This is more than just talking to your workers, as a leader you need to give your workers real-life examples of incidents that have life-changing effects on workers: their health, finances, family and livelihood.
Once workers have the knowledge, it’s up to them to maintain hand safety awareness. Team leaders, however, need to ensure they monitor and review the workplace to ensure controls are in place / being used.
Leading the way in safe practices to reduce the number of hand injuries on site.
If you’ve got a question about hand injuries or any other health and safety matter, the HazardCo Advisory Team is here to help. Give them a call on 0800 555 339, option 4.
When risks and hazards are recognised early, controls can be put in place to prevent harm to workers, visitors, and the public.
Reporting and controlling hazards/risks is a way of being proactive and helping create a safe environment for everyone to work in.
A key part of the Health & Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) and regulations is the need to both identify these hazards, and then manage the risks involved so they are either removed or controlled correctly. Creating a Task in the HazardCo App to report the hazard is a simple and effective way to manage this responsibility.
There are always going to be hazards and risks on construction sites; they are dynamic places. Identifying the hazards that could cause serious injury or harm to both workers’ health and safety helps manage risk as the project moves along and helps those who manage the jobs plan for them better in the future.
For example:
The concrete pumping truck has a blockage on-site, and the team decides to try and rectify the blockage whilst other workers are in close proximity. Joe is aware of the hazards and risks of clearing blockages under high pressure, and that someone could get seriously injured if things go wrong. He recommends that the concrete pumping team stop and do it away from other workers in a safe location. Because no incident or near miss occurred of anyone getting or nearly getting hurt, Joe logs this hazard as a Task in the HazardCo App.
The company reviews all the tasks that have been logged for the project and sees Joe’s reported hazard. With new knowledge of the dangers involved and the controls used to manage the risks of concrete truck blockages. The company decides to use those controls on all sites going forward.
Hazard reporting is an effective and ongoing way for workers to raise concerns or suggest improvements on a day-to-day basis, whilst also helping PCBU’s meet the worker engagement and participation duty under the Act.
Hazard example:
Joe notices an extension cable has been badly damaged and is still plugged in. He turns off the power and removes the cable from services and logs it as a Task in the HazardCo App before someone could get hurt.
Reporting hazards as a Task in the HazardCo App helps with:
Near miss example:
Joe sees a fellow worker about to roll up a badly damaged extension cord whilst it is still plugged in, he immediately stops the worker before he could have got hurt. Turns off the power and removes the cable from service and logs a near miss as an Incident in the HazardCo App.
Reporting a near miss helps with:
If you have any questions get in touch with the HazardCo Team
With every new contractor you bring on board, remember to tick these boxes to make sure they are going to hit the ground running when it comes to health and safety on-site. It’s your responsibility as the main contractor to make sure these checks and balances are in place.
There are lots of different ways you can check their health and safety processes. A policy is a good place to start, as well as examples of what they will do on-site if they have an incident and how they will record toolbox talks. You should also ask for an example SWMS for any high-risk work they will do.
We recommend checking these items before they come on-site so you don’t forget. Tip: Ask for a photograph of the items for your records.
The on-site induction is your opportunity to set expectations of how you expect the contractor to participate in risk identification and management. New workers are at a greater risk of injuring themself than your existing crew so a good induction is vital in avoiding injuries and downtime.
Stay on top of these checks with an automated system
Find out more about HazardCo’s Pre-Qualification solution here
There are a lot of things to keep in mind when setting up H&S on your construction site that it can seem overwhelming. Use this guide as a tool to understand what you need to do from start to end of your build.
Your obligations as the main contractor are pretty straightforward. First, you need to make sure contractors have the right skills and experience to do the job, and second, you need to make sure they are going to carry out the work safely. Once they are on board, you also need to monitor if the contractor is following good health and safety practices on-site.
Collecting evidence of this process is important so we recommend putting a system in place so nothing falls through the cracks.
To understand how your contractors manage their Health and Safety it’s important that you talk to your contractors and check that they can show a commitment to keeping workers and visitors safe. This can be demonstrated through clear procedures outlined in their Health and Safety documents, as well as evidence of risk assessments, monitoring work activities, emergency management etc.
The following areas should be included in their Health and Safety Procedures:
When you’ve got a lot of contractors coming and going, it can turn into a bit of a headache trying to stay on top of checking all these documents. We’ve created a simple, automated system to nail the pre-qualification of your contractors before you begin working with them, to reduce the risk to your business.
Find out more about HazardCo’s Pre-Qualification Tools here
When you start a new build, it is important that health and safety is considered and communicated with everyone coming onto site. If this is created at the beginning of your build, and clear direction is provided and shared, it helps to create and foster a good safety culture on-site. With HazardCo it’s easy to set up your site by creating a project in the Hub, all you need to do is:
We recommend that before the project starts, you should think about setting up site fencing, emergency equipment, toilets, handwashing facilities. Make sure that you set up your HazardCo Hazard Board with the site-specific QR code at the entrance of the build.
Documentation is a key way of showing that Health and Safety is active on-site and provides evidence in areas like incident investigations and learnings that are shared from these. This can be in either digital or physical format. Use the HazardCo tools on the App and Hub for all your H&S needs.
If you’re not the main contractor on-site
We recommend that you use the HazardCo App and Hub to manage your on-site health and safety. At the beginning of each day, complete a Risk Assessment on the HazardCo App. This will help identify that the work area is safe and ensure that you have the correct controls in place for common construction hazards.
Remember to use the HazardCo App to report any incidents or near misses on your site. This will notify the HazardCo Advisory Team and we will help guide you through the next steps.
During your job
The HazardCo Team Pack plus is designed specifically for subcontractors who move around from job to job regularly and aren’t usually in charge of managing larger building projects. The pack is great for managing client or visitor inductions and safety procedures while you’re on the go.
The Team Pack Plus includes:
Don’t forget, as part of your membership, you get unlimited access to the HazardCo team.
Phone Support
The support you need from people who know their stuff.
It’s important to us that you and your crew are kept safe. You know the drill, we’re here to help, so get in touch if there’s anything you need. You can contact us on 0800 555 339 or email info@hazardco.com.
Businesses (PCBUs) that work together will often share health and safety duties in relation to work done. Businesses especially have a legal duty to consult, cooperate with, and coordinate activities with all other businesses they share overlapping duties with.
What does this mean and how can you ensure that people are not harmed, and you are complying with your legal obligations? Here are some expectations:
The following key steps should be followed by Main Contractor:
Scope
Prequalify
Select
Appoint
Monitor
Review
Working along other businesses is a natural part of residential construction. Everyone on-site has a duty to open up the lines of communication and look out for each other.
You can read more about contractor management and overlapping duties here or if you have any questions about working with other businesses on-site, give our expert Advisory Team a call on 0800 555 339.
Even if you are self-employed you still carry the same duties under the legislation as the main contractor.
If a contractor, in turn, engages other businesses then they too must assume some of the responsibility for their work. A contractor is most likely to have the greatest influence and control of their own work activities and workers (or contractors).
There should be a way of recording your planning and the ways in which you share this information. All businesses should have access to information to keep themselves or their workers safe.
Your primary duty remains to prevent harm arising from your work. Identify risks that could arise and share information between relevant parties.
The following key steps should be followed by contractors:
Scope
Prequalify
Select
Appoint
Monitor
Review
Working along other businesses is a natural part of residential construction. Everyone on-site has a duty to open up the lines of communication and look out for each other.
You can read more about contractor management and overlapping duties here or if you have any questions about working with other businesses on-site, give our expert Advisory Team a call on 0800 555 339.
Health and safety issues arise from a worker raising concern about health and safety at the workplace and that concern remains unresolved after consultation with the worker/s and the PCBU (Employer), it then becomes a health and safety issue.
For example, an issue could include a difference in opinion on whether something is a potential risk to health and safety, or whether a particular control measure is acceptable.
There are issue resolution requirements in Health and Safety legislation that outlines how a health and safety issue should be resolved, with the aim to agree on how to fix the problem, as soon as possible, to avoid further dispute or a similar future issue. If after reasonable efforts the issue cannot be resolved, then it can be referred to the regulator (WorkSafe) by completing the ‘Request Assistance to Resolve a Work Health and Safety Matter’ form available on their website.
The following details need to be taken into account when assessing the severity (risk level) of the issue, and from there deciding who needs to be involved:
An agreed H&S Issue Resolution Procedure is a process or steps for resolving health and safety issues in the workplace which has been agreed upon by directors / management / workers.
You can establish an agreed procedure for a workplace. To do this, make sure the procedure contains:
It is recommended to have a procedure in place in the event of an issue arising, or the steps provided in legislation can be followed.
Once the relevant people have been made aware of the details of the issue and the level of risk has been assessed, health and safety regulations set out the default procedure for resolving it.
Multiple people can be involved in the issue resolution process, depending on the risk of the issue, to ensure adequate consultation and the best outcome occurs. This means it could be:
If you or your worker would like to involve representatives in the issue resolution process you are able to do so. A representative does not necessarily need to have health and safety expertise. This could include people such as a designer of a piece of equipment at the workplace, or a person with workplace consultation and negotiation skills. Depending on the nature of the H&S issue, advice or assistance from a range of experts may be required to reach an appropriate and informed resolution between the involved parties.
Things to remember:
When the issue has been resolved, details of the issue and the resolution should be set out in a written agreement. If a written agreement is prepared:
If you’ve got a question about Health and Safety issue resolution or any other health and safety matter, the HazardCo Advisory Team is here to help. Give us a call on 0800 555 339.
