Past Events › Safety & Health

On 16 March 2022, the Federal Legislation had gazetted the Occupational Safety and Health (Amendment) Act 2022 (Act) by introducing new sections, amending certain sections, and deleting certain sections of the principal Act. The amendments are aimed at providing workers with a better quality of safe and healthy environment and also welfare. Directors must be aware of their individual, joint and several liabilities for occupational health violations. The highlights of the amendments are that it increases the protection accorded to an employee and places additional responsibilities on employers/principals towards their employee. Further, there has been an increase in penalties as a financial deterrent effort.

Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) is an approach that can be applied successfully; it is gaining more interest across industry sectors globally and has the great advantage of needing the involvement of the individual employee, in addition of course, to employer commitment. Behaviors-Based Safety (BBS), which is often described as a bottom-up approach (frontline employees), with top-down support from safety leaders. A behavior-based safety approach promotes interventions that are people-focused and often incorporate one-to-one or group observations of employees performing routine work tasks, setting goals carefully and giving timely feedback on safety-related behavior, coaching and mentoring. The initiatives have a proactive focus, encouraging individuals and their work groups to consider the potential for incident involvement, (accidents) and to assess their own behavior as safe or unsafe always, no matter what.

The occupational noise-related hearing disorder has recorded alarming statistics as major contributor to total cases of occupational diseases. According to National Occupational Accident and Disease Statistics 2021 by Department of Statistics Malaysia, occupational noise-related hearing disorder reported 3,648 cases out of total 5,289 cases in Occupational Disease and Poisoning Statistics 2021*. In further updates reported by The Star on 11 August 2022, in the first five months of 2022, out of the total 2,042 cases occupational disease reported, 1,273 cases (62.3%) were occupational noise-induced hearing loss, while in year 2019, 5,699 cases were confirmed as occupational noise-related hearing disorders**. The Industry Code of Practice for Management of Occupational Noise Exposure and Hearing Conservation 2019 provides guidelines to assist all stakeholders in managing cases of occupational noise-related hearing disorder in the aspects of monitoring and enforcement, reporting, compensation claiming, reduction and prevention of occupational noise induced hearing loss.

Managing Safety in the Workplace is the responsibility of everyone in an organization. Companies have legal obligations to meet certain safety requirements, but only some go further than the minimum obligations. Safety standards and procedures must be put in place, and everyone needs to follow the standards for them to be effective. Managing Safety in the Workplace program will be instrumental in reviewing common hazards, Safety techniques, Safety Management, Safety Trends and after completion, the participants will have the tools to help them create a Safety platform for the work place. By identifying and anticipating hazards, employers can prevent injuries and keep employees safe.

Section 15 of Occupational Health and Safety Act states that employer's responsibility is to ensure safe workplace and manage risk as low as tolerable as to prevent injury at workplace. The responsibility of managing risk is crucial and establish as HIRARC safe system of work program is important as it also complying with this section. This program offers a technique of risk management including hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control.