Food industry loses by coming first

Coming first doesn’t always mean being a winner. The food and beverage industry beats all other industries when it comes to the number of workplace accidents in Australia - particularly in meat and meat product manufacturing. Hardly an achievement worth publicising, is it?

The Christmas rush also means that November and December are the deadliest months for workers in the industry. Workers in manufacturing, construction and transport record the highest incident of serious accident claims overall during this period.

The Group Training Association of Victoria (GTAV) has released Safety First, a free app that it says will help keep apprentices and trainees safe through the Christmas rush and beyond.

Screenshot of the Safety First app.

Inexperienced workers under 25 are especially prone to accident and are 18% more likely to sustain a work injury than their older colleagues. The Safety First app was designed with this in mind, to help new entrants to the workforce improve their understanding of OHS.

“Our members employ 8500 apprentices and trainees across Victoria and are committed to ensuring their staff, particularly those that are on a new worksite, or equipment and plant, have handy access to the safety information checklists they need,” said Gary Workman, executive director of GTAV.

“Now apprentices have the safety questions they should be able to answer right in their pocket.

“This is especially important for trades like plumbing, electrical and construction where apprentices can find themselves on a different worksite, with different potential hazards, every day.”

The Safety First app in action.

GTAV’s new safety app will bring technology-enabled features into the traditional OHS documentation, streamlining it and ensuring it is more site-specific.

The app provides instant feedback to apprentices, with links to further information and a ‘percentage completed’ indicator that will highlight how much information each individual knows for each worksite.

From an employer point of view, the app will provide a permanent compliance record for each employee on every worksite they attend, with the ability to produce electronic certificates of OHS induction completion levels that can be emailed or sent as an SMS.

The app is available to download from Google Play and the iTunes store.