Pam Pryor awarded AO

It’s with great pride that I write to you all to let you know that the Institute’s current national manager of the Australian OHS Body of Knowledge (BoK), Pamela Pryor, received an Order of Australia last week for a career of exceptional contribution to the field of health and safety, not only as a health and safety professional and through her research and academic contributions, but at the systemic level in ways which are having a long lasting impact.

The work of the Safety Institute of Australia in creating lasting programs which can build the capability of health and safety people over the longer term, has been based in recent years around a series of nationally significant projects.  Pam has played a significant hand in all of them. In doing so, she has created a legacy which has made an extraordinary difference.

Every profession needs a knowledge base. The Australian OHS Body of Knowledge underpins the knowledge base for the work of professionals, and is used today as a core reference point for Australian university OHS qualifications. Pam has overseen the development of its chapters, drawing on a wide range of experts from both academia and the profession in each case, to come together and build each chapter which has resulted in an extraordinary body of work. I personally consider the BoK to be the greatest asset of Australia’s Health and Safety Profession, and it is referenced today throughout many countries around the world.

Every profession needs confidence in its educational programs. As the founding registrar for the Australian OHS Education Accreditation Board, Pam has been integral to a small team driving this initiative which today accredits nearly all of Australia’s OHS University courses, in an accreditation process which supports greater consistency and quality across the board from our highly committed educators at our universities. The changes driven by the accreditation process have been significant. The process includes feedback loops which include advice from the profession.  Pam is also currently Chairing a review of VET curriculum for the Business Services IRC, and working hard to make changes to a weak VET WHS curriculum, even as some other stakeholders are seeking to do little or nothing. 

Every profession needs to clarify the knowledge and skill requirements for its work. Four years ago, global heads of health and safety in the mining sector asked the International Safety and Health Professional Organisations (INSHPO) of which the Institute is a part, for a body of work to be used internationally which defines different levels of WHS work, and the knowledge and skill requirements at each level. Pam has been one of the leaders and a co-author of that project throughout, and at the launch last September in Singapore of the Global OHS Professional Capability Framework, organisations from 22 countries adopted the framework.

Most professions have a system to certify capability and promote their people, and of course in WHS, the British, Americans and Canadians have been doing it for decades. Pam has been one of the architects of our certification program which is now in its third year. It’s not simple to introduce a new set of standards into a pre-existing field, and we continue to fine-tune the program, but it is an intergenerational project which is growing all the time and now demonstrably helping us raise the profile of health and safety people within Australian companies.

Effective professional bodies have ways to influence the standards of the training that their people get, and Pam has been working with me on the preparatory work for our training and professional development framework, which allows us to assess and support training which we can have confidence in promoting as good value and good content.

That’s just a part of the story of Pam Pryor. I say with great respect that there is nobody in my three years at the Institute I have argued with more as I interrogated ideas and systemic health and safety issues - and in this Pam has taught me so much. On behalf of the Board, staff and members of the Institute, congratulations Pam. We have always been immensely proud of you and your achievements, your passion and your service, so it great to see that more widely acknowledged with this high honour.