Echoes of Days Gone By #2

Michael Morgan, Managing Director of the WHS Foundation (the successor to IFAP) has kindly given me permission to reproduce the book reviews I submitted for publication in Safety WA over the many years I worked at IFAP.

My second review was of Productive Safety Management by Western Australian author Tania Van der Stap , who is now the Principal Director at ALIGN Risk Management.

The original review is published here, as it was presented to the editors of Safety WA in 2003.

Having met with the author some time before final publication of this book, I was keen to obtain a copy and get down to a serious read. Gladly, I am delighted to say that I wasn’t disappointed – this is an excellent text that should form part of every Safety and Health practitioners’ technical reference library.

?Apart from the (parochial) fact that the text is written by a local author (and therefore many references and examples used have local context), what I like most about the book is that it follows a logical (almost systematic) approach to the topic of safety and health management systems.

?Starting from the baseline that systems are deployed as a technique for managing organisational risk, the book then addresses individual aspects of systems that are crucial to effective OSH performance. The sections on Training – building the organizations’ capacity and Behavioural audits, in which the author lays the foundation for the assertion that successful safety management systems require a supportive culture that in turn can be shaped by employee empowerment via competence are very well argued.

?Practitioners whose role has evolved into those aligned with their organisations’ corporate social responsibility obligations would be well served by reading Chapter 5 in which integrated management systems are addressed.

?The authors’ hypothesis of entropic risk may well prove to be a milestone contribution to the safety and health discipline. Whilst I have difficulties reconciling the term ‘entropy’ as a descriptor, there can be no doubt that Ms Mol’s treatise of the processes by which systems tend to degrade over time is insightful and well articulated.

?Each chapter of the book contains an extensive list of references, and the author has also included a very useful Glossary of Terms. Do not be daunted by the 400 plus pages: this book? should be mandatory reading for anyone in, or wishing to enter the occupational safety and health discipline.

Published by Butterworth-Henneman, 2003??????????????????????? ISBN 0 7506 922 X

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