The National Road Safety Partnership Program (NRSPP) is piloting an online seven-unit course over two months in collaboration with Flinders, Griffith and Monash Universities.
The purpose of the course is to help senior leadership establish safe management of its mobile workforce in light and grey fleet vehicles focused on the why, what and how.
Outcome of course
Attendees will be guided in a methodology for completing a 6-month action plan to implement an organisational strategy for the safe mobility of workers in grey and light vehicles.
Why does safe workers on the road matter?
Road crashes represent the most common form of work-related fatality with 2/3 of worker fatalties involving a vehicle. As a result, driving for work purposes is a considerable road safety risk. A key issue is light vehicle workers they are out of sight and therefore often out of mind.
Yet, under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, organisations must provide a safe working environment. The Act states a workplace is any place where work is carried out for a business or undertaking and includes any place where a worker goes or is likely to be while at work, including vehicles and other mobile structures. Vehicles are seen as a workplace when workers are operating within an organisation’s Grey Fleet.
What is the role of a leaders in protecting their mobile workers?
The safety culture of an organisation is guided and grown by its leadership. So, if the leaders do not understand the risk their workers face when on the road, their legal responsibility or the cost benefit of safely managing those workers then others in the organisation will struggle to influence it.
The reality is there is no ‘silver bullet’for keeping workers safe on the road. Establishing an effective safety management strategy for a mobile workforce takes significant time/years to successfully implement and thus should be viewed as an investment. The strategy should be based around Safe Systems approach and underpinned by the hierarchy of risk Creating a safety management strategy can be easy, but the hard part is implementing and converting it into tangible actions which manages expectations and resourcing.
How will the Safe Mobility Systems Directors and Officers course assist?
The course is limited to a maximum 25 industry participants who will embark on a journey together to understand their own organisation’s road related risks, operational gaps and develop solutions to address them. The six modules will be delivered virtually involving interactive presentations followed by break out sessions to deep dive into the topic.
