You recently joined a community medical centre and are part of the WHS team working towards establishing work health and safety practices. The community medical centre has been recently audited by the WHS authorities following a range of complaints from employees and clients. The centre established a new WHS team to review its policies and procedures and implement better WHS practices.

13. You identified that the community medical centre’s workplace health and safety policies are not comprehensive. You are asked to develop the following for your workplace:
• Procedures for ongoing hazard identification, and assessment and control of associated risks.
• Strategies for consultative WHS activities.
• Processes to ensure that responsibilities and duties are documented for key job roles and accountability processes are in place.
• WHS record-keeping policies and procedures – include in your policy and procedures what WHS records and data will be stored, how these will be collected, stored and maintained, who will be responsible for maintaining WHS records and how the privacy and confidentiality requirements should be addressed.
Develop these procedures and attach it as an additional document as evidence.

14. From the injury records, you gathered information that six workers and clients incurred fractures and dislocations related to trips and slips. Briefly describe how you could implement risk controls and hazard-specific procedures ensuring they are consistent with the hierarchy of control to mitigate risks involved with slips, trips and falls.

Hierarchy of control                                                 Examples of strategies
Eliminate the hazard   -
Substitution -
Isolation -
Engineering controls -
Administrative controls -
Personal protective equipment -

15. Who will you contact if you need expert WHS advice to establish and implement safe systems of work?

16. Briefly describe how you would request WHS advice from this person/organisation.

17. Representatives of workers from various departments were consulted and allowed to provide feedback on various WHS policies and procedures. Once the consultation processes are completed, how will you communicate the outcomes and implementation of policies and procedures to workers?

18. The following are some statements from your workplace’s existing WHS record-keeping policies and procedures. Evaluate these policy statements and briefly explain whether they comply with WHS legislative requirements. Provide rationale in terms of WHS legislative requirements.
• All employees hold equal responsibility for the development of record keeping requirements for the community medical centre.
• All employees hold equal responsibility for the creation, modification and review of WHS record-keeping policies and procedures.
• Only the following records must be stored and maintained:
o Material safety data sheets
o Incident reports
o Audit reports.
• WHS inspection checklists, injury reports and training documentation could be discarded once the report is compiled, injury is attended to or training is provided.
• All employees can access WHS records and reports.