Construction site safety questions and answers (HSWA 2015)

Terms like PCBU, reasonably practicable and notifiable event get used on site every day by people who could not define them under pressure. These are the definitions, and then the questions that test whether you can apply them.

What is a PCBU under HSWA 2015?

A person conducting a business or undertaking. In practice this is almost always the business entity rather than a person, the company, the partnership, the sole trader's business. It is the duty holder with the primary duty of care.

What is the primary duty of care?

The PCBU must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of its workers, of workers it influences or directs, and of other people put at risk by the work. That last part catches out sites that think about staff but not about the public walking past.

What does reasonably practicable mean?

It weighs: how likely the hazard or risk is, how severe the harm would be, what the person knows or ought to know about the risk and ways of controlling it, the availability and suitability of those controls, and finally the cost, where cost counts only if it is grossly disproportionate to the risk.

Cost is last and heavily qualified. Any answer that treats expense as a general reason not to control a risk has misread the test.

What are a worker's duties?

Workers must take reasonable care for their own health and safety, take reasonable care that their acts or omissions do not adversely affect others, comply as far as reasonably able with reasonable instructions, and co-operate with reasonable policies.

Duties are shared, not transferred. A PCBU's duty does not disappear because a worker also has one.

What is a notifiable event?

A death, a notifiable injury or illness, or a notifiable incident arising from work. Notifiable incidents include certain exposures to serious risk, which is why an event where nobody was hurt can still be notifiable.

What must be reported to WorkSafe, and when?

Notifiable events must be notified to WorkSafe as soon as possible after becoming aware of them, with records kept. The site of a notifiable event generally must not be disturbed beyond what is needed to help the injured, make the site safe, or comply with an authority's direction.

Worked questions

A scaffold collapses overnight. Nobody is on site and nobody is injured. Is this notifiable?

It should be assessed as a notifiable incident. The collapse of plant or a structure of that kind is exactly the sort of event the notifiable incident category is designed to capture, precisely because the absence of injury was luck rather than control. Answers that reason no injury, no notification have the logic backwards.

Dust exposure could be controlled by wet-cutting, or by issuing respirators. Which does the Act point to?

Wet-cutting. It is an engineering control that reduces the hazard at source, and it sits above PPE in the hierarchy. Respirators are a supplement, not a substitute.

A subcontractor's worker is injured. The main contractor says it is the subcontractor's problem. Is it?

No. Duties overlap. More than one PCBU can hold a duty in relation to the same work, and they must consult, co-operate and co-ordinate with each other. Contractual arrangements do not carve up statutory duties.

These concepts also underpin temporary traffic management, and sit behind the Site Safe Review of Understanding.