StayLive – a collaborative, industry wide Health and Safety initiative
StayLive’s creation recognised the need for a collaborative industry-wide approach to drive material and sustainable improvement in health and safety performance.
Contact Energy, Genesis Energy, Meridian Energy, Mighty River Power, Pioneer Energy and Trustpower agreed to set aside their rivalries and work together to pursue a common zero harm goal, alongside Transpower and the Electricity Engineers’ Association. Member companies have board and chief executive level mandates to pursue health and safety initiatives with the highest priority.
StayLive has developed a common set of health and safety measures that now covers a period sufficient to observe clear trends. One key performance indicator for the group is the total reportable injury frequency rate (TRIFR) which measures work injuries for every 200,000 hours worked.
The TRIFR of StayLive members has declined by 32 per cent from a rate of 1.56 injuries in 2012 to 1.06 as at March 31, 2016.
StayLive advances its goals by involving key health and safety, and operational professionals of its member companies to address a range of industry wide challenges.
Members meet every six weeks to share health and safety performance information, which includes not only incidents of harm, but also near miss data, and the reasons why a near miss may have occurred. This enables all members to learn from each other and take pro-active steps to avoid similar incidents.
For example, the learnings from a serious near miss that was the result of equipment failure at a Mighty River Power site, was shared at StayLive. This information was then taken back to Genesis Energy which found it had the same equipment in three locations. Although the same fault was not found, inspectors noted that where the fault occurred would not have been picked up during routine inspections.
Another novel aspect of StayLive is the use of shared incident investigators, to ensure that an investigation is carried out thoroughly and objectively.
Having an external investigator from another member company means the investigator understands the industry but, importantly, is not familiar with the site and the way it operates. That is beneficial as familiarity can lead observers to jump to conclusions.
StayLive is working on priority work streams to drive consistency of application and improve quality across the industry. These include: contractor pre-qualification, working alone, work controls, training and competency, confined spaces and process safety. A StayLive member is assigned as the lead for each work stream, with specialists from the member companies supporting each initiative.
StayLive’s next step is to launch a website, which the Electricity Engineers’ Association has offered to host. That will enable the group to freely share the information and learnings that it has been developing.
The Health & Safety Initiative of the Year award category is sponsored by Nexans.