Page 808 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 July 1989
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document encourages the innovation of ways to publicise information and to encourage participation in activities designed to improve the general level of staff health. Already, under the terms of the agreement, the hospitals division of the service has begun to implement a program to overcome problems associated with manual handling, which accounts for about 40 per cent of all compensation claims.
As a result of the signing of the agreement, in-house training programs are likely to begin soon in the hospitals division, whose staff are already participating in specially designed training programs conducted at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. In addition, a program is under way for the compilation of safety information about more than 60,000 chemicals available for use by the service.
Under this agreement, management of the ACT Community and Health Service recognises that it has a legal responsibility to provide a healthy and safe place of work. Importantly, management agrees to plan for the provision of sufficient funds to implement any programs developed under the agreement. Employees of the service will accept responsibility to work safely and to take immediate action to avoid situations involving an unacceptable level of risk to their safety.
To implement the agreement, each division within the organisation has an occupational health and safety policy committee. These committees have the important role of distributing information and seeing that occupational health and safety activities are efficiently coordinated across each division. These committees will report regularly to senior management.
Within each division, branch operations will each have their own local health and safety committees. Each section of employment will be eligible to appoint representatives to the committees, which will meet on a monthly basis. In fact, within the hospital services division of the organisation, these committees have been meeting since last December in anticipation of the agreement coming into place, as it duly did, on 22 May this year.
Members would be interested to know that, because of the existence of this agreement, major industrial unrest at the Royal Canberra Hospital was averted on Friday, 23 June. Prompt action by employees of the service led to an immediate resolution of problems associated with the discovery of asbestos fibre in an air-conditioning tunnel near the hospital's boiler room.
I would like to thank my fellow members of the Assembly for giving me this opportunity today to outline the details of this momentous agreement. Given that members will soon be considering general legislation due to be reintroduced into this Assembly covering workers in the private sector, I commend members to fully consider what this Government has
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