Significant changes in the socio-economic landscape in Guyana demand that the country’s policy-makers at both the public and private sector levels begin to create a radical shift in the manner in which they perceive the importance of safety and health in the workplace. “There is a real danger that sooner rather than later our ongoing failure to take account of the safety considerations at workplaces will lead us down the path of a crisis,” local safety and health instructor Dale Beresford told Stabroek Business.
“The challenges are twofold. It is not just a question of getting our heads around our current workplace safety and health responsibilities which we have seriously neglected over the years. It is also a question of beginning to contemplate those evolving and new safety and health challenges that are arising out of developments like the significant expansion of the gold-mining and construction sectors as well as what we are told is the imminent emergence of an oil and natural gas industry. There is no persuasive evidence that we are anywhere near ready to meet the challenges associated with safety and health in these sectors,” Beresford said.
“Setting aside the present underdevelopment of our existing safety and health sector, new industries and new types of challenges will mean that even the people with some measure of training will have to be re-trained and oriented to cater for new and entirely different challenges with which we are at the moment unfamiliar,” Beresford continued, adding that as a whole, “we cannot afford to wait any longer to begin to embrace this reality and do something about it.”
And according to Beresford, beginning from where we are at this time, the situation is far from encouraging. “A lot of what we do in safety and health at this time takes place at the level of rhetoric. The reality is that our workplaces in both the public and private sectors could be facing a serious safety and health crisis that leaves employees seriously vulnerable to sickness and injury and there appears to be no real sense of urgency on the part of those who manage to correct the existing anomalies by implementing risk-reduction strategies at those workplaces,” Beresford told Stabroek Business in an extended interview on Tuesday.
Beresford, who is seeking to promote an ongoing series of safety and health training seminars which he will shortly be launching at the Critchlow Labour College, told this newspaper that the worst thing that Guyana can do is to “fantasize about the economic prospects of oil exploitation without seriously considering the challenges associated with the country becoming an oil-producer, including those challenges associated with safety and health.” He is seeking, he says, through the targeting of participants from both the public and private sectors, to reach beyond the trainees and into the institutions in which they work and serve in an effort to ensure that the relevance of the training goes beyond “the mere passing on of knowledge.”
The Certificate Course in Occupational Safety and Health which is being delivered at the Critchlow Labour College is divided into four modules, namely, Introduction to Occupation Safety and Health, Law, International Law and International Labour Organization Systems; Hazard Analysis, Accidents and Causation Theory and Environmental Management, Safety Management, Risk Assessment and Protective Equipment.
Beresford said that on the whole the “safety and health deficit at workplaces in Guyana” could well have reached “proportions of a crisis” and that while his sensitization and training initiatives target workplaces in both the public and private sectors these are only likely to make a difference if they are accompanied by a change in attitude to workplace safety “at the level of the people who are positioned to make the changes that matter.”
“The big question – and this question has arisen before – is whether the bosses as we call them, the managers, the administrators, the decision-makers are sufficiently sensitized to the importance of having workplace safety and health policies and to ensuring the effective implementation of those policies,” Beresford said.
Asked if his own training programmes were a reflection of an acknowledgement of a training deficit Beresford responded in the affirmative.
“That is not secret. I am saying that in both the public and private sectors, on shop floors, in industry, in the mining sector and in the Ministry of Social Protection where the skills and experience in safety and health should be there is a deficit, a serious one… and it is not just a question of a deficit in training. The state agencies have a monitoring function, an oversight function and there is the question of whether or not those functions are being executed properly or whether, in some cases, they are being executed at all,” Beresford said.
The reality of the Guyana situation, he said, had compelled him to adapt new strategies designed to compensate for what he called “the reality of a lack of awareness of the importance of safety and health” a management levels in the public and private sectors. “It occurs to me that we need to do more than simply target employees at workplaces for safety and health training. We have to interface with the managers to ensure that they are buying in to the idea of safety and health in a practical way.
We have to ensure that the training that they are paying for is linked to the needs of the entity in a practical way and we have to do what we can to ensure that the skills that are thought are used, that the people who are trained are allowed to function,” Beresford said, adding that the safety and health demands at workplaces in Guyana now require that “safety and health committees in workplaces exist for reasons that go beyond window-dressing.”
