Australasian Mine Safety

Australasian Mine Safety Spring 2011

Australasian Mine Safety is the leading voice for all key decision makers within Mining company's and major contractors. Delivering the latest industry news as it breaks.

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Safety Dave A JSA argues that while a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) is designed to enhance the risk management process on a worksite, it will never save a life on its own. Too much paperwork! Is it simply workers having a whinge, or is it a legitimate complaint? If nothing else, it is a growing issue and I reckon in many cases the concerns of workers are very legitimate. In fact, when I think back over the last 16 years of being in health and safety I can't remember a time when there were so many documents that had to be completed by workers. To be specific, I'm talking about the prevalence of documents such as JSAs, JHAs, JSEAs, MWSs, SWMSs, Take 5s, Step Backs, Pre-starts, Inspections, and Safety Observations etc. In this article, I am going to talk about JSAs (Job Safety Analysis) as an example of typical work group paperwork that is done, and I am going to discuss what I see as the problems associated with the use of these tools, and some ideas on how to improve things. It was never meant to be about the paperwork Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that the original purpose of having a JSA has been lost. If you ask most workers they often think it is about protecting the company or management, and this isn't helped when supervisors tell workers that once they have signed the JSA they will go to jail if something goes wrong. The reality is that JSAs (and most of the other safety documents) are designed to support other primary risk management activities or processes. For example, the JSA captures the hazards, risks and controls, and helps to formalise and structure the process, but it doesn't do the identification for the work group. A JSA won't tell anyone if they have missed a critical hazard or if there is a control that no one will follow. Similarly, a plant pre-start checklist captures the fact that a pre-start has been done, and helps minimise the chance of forgetting something that has to be checked, but it doesn't actually check if the brakes are working. Documents won't save a life A JSA is a tool. As referred to above, it is designed to enhance the risk management process, and because it is just a tool it will never save a life on its own. What I mean is that a JSA won't change behavior. Only people can change other people's behavior. However there seems to be so much focus on having a JSA that once it exists there can be complete assumption that it is going to make the job safe. In essence, the JSA becomes a ticket to get the job done, with (sometimes) very little regard to the actual content of the document in terms of whether it can be effectively implemented. Reserve JSA's for higher risk tasks If you talk to people who have been around WHS for a while, the use of JSAs has changed over the last 10 to 15 years. Once upon a time JSAs were reserved for higher risk tasks, whereas now we have workers and work groups having to complete them for everyday routine activities, and sometimes they have to re-write them every day for their everyday routine tasks. Safety Dave Whitfield 58 The Australasian Mine Safety Journal Spring 2011

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