By Amanda Wells
The Working Safe programme is now free to parishes – and those who’ve already completed it say they’re pleased with the results.
Working Safe is a training programme that equips one person in each church with risk management skills. It means that this person can develop a health and safety plan for the parish.
Assembly Executive Secretary the Rev Martin Baker says the programme has been made free “because we don’t want cost to be a barrier to any parish in undertaking this important work”.
“People are our biggest asset, and it’s important that we do everything possible to keep them safe.”
The Presbyterian Working Safe programme grew out of discussions with St Columba at Botany Church in Auckland, which had developed expertise in this area. A St Columba elder, David Dransfield, worked for web-based health and safety training company Working Safe. Working Safe was contracted to provide a customised Presbyterian programme, which was initially priced at $260 a year for each participating parish.
A roadshow developed by St Columba, with the support of Assembly office staff, was run around New Zealand, promoting the programme. But the take-up of the programme didn’t meet expectations. This lead Martin to negotiate an agreement with Working Safe to cover the entire Church, so that individual churches did not have to pay a fee.
Rob Gardner, convenor of the site management team at St Alban’s Presbyterian in Palmerston North, has a background in building compliance and has completed the Working Safe training, which takes the form of online questions and answers.
Rob says he completed the training over three days. “It wasn’t hard.”
“I built up a file of documents that we’ll use going forward. We’ll use these for our compliance work.”
The main outcome of the course is the creation of a health and safety manual for your church that includes the following documents: health and safety policy statement, hazard register, hazardous substances register, employee induction/training records, employee acknowledgement form, accident/incident register, OSH accident report forms, and OSH notification of serious harm forms.
Rob says that people without a background in health and safety or building compliance should find Working Safe a good programme.
“It’s pretty well up there with what I’ve seen in local government and larger corporations.
“You don’t want to limit health and safety to just inside the building. You want a system that will encompass all activities that you’re likely to experience.”
Linda Hatten of St Ninian’s Uniting, Karori, Wellington, says she appreciated the simplicity of the online training system.
“It’s just a matter of putting time aside. I quite enjoyed it, it was very straightforward, fun and relatively simple.”
Previously the church had been using a hardcopy guide to liability and risk management, which could be “quite daunting” in terms of finding the relevant material.
Linda says at first she did bits of the online course every now and then over a period of four months, but later made a more concerted effort to complete it “and get it out of the way”. “I found it was better to sit down and do an hour or two a week. It wouldn’t take long that way.”
The online tests and feedback made it easy to learn the material, she says, and were aimed at a “fairly basic” level of computer user.
“I’m sure people will find it well worth while.”
If you have any questions about the Working Safe programme, please contact Margaret at margaret@presbyterian.org.nz