Wagstaff Cranbourne - Our WHS journey

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Hello MINTRACker readers,

Back in 2011 here at Wagstaff Cranbourne (a multi species abattoir located at Cranbourne VIC) we had a serious injury on our beef kill floor, where one of our most experienced slaughterman, (over 30 years) received a serious injury to his left index finger while operating the beef hide puller.

Wagstaff Management were keen to cooperate with the Victorian WorkCover Authority over the accident to ensure a constructive outcome. As a consequence an agreement was reached on an Enforceable Undertaking which involved Wagstaff’s

• appointing an external consultant to assist with
  
  1. conducting risk assessments on all tasks, equipment and plant
  2. an annual review of risk assessments
  3. a review of policies and procedures
  4. review of work instructions
     
• facilitating a safety seminar for processors
• facilitating a supervisor safety seminar
• having an article published in an industry publication
  

The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the changes to the plant Wagstaff's have made that have helped improve our WHS performance. At the same time we were addressing our WHS issues a fire in 2013 severely damaged the abattoir, with over 70% of Wagstaff facility being destroyed by the fire including the small stock and beef kill floors as well as half of the chillers.

While this was a big setback it did allow us to review and redesign the plant to overcome many of the WHS issues. With the rebuild we were able to make some changes to our existing kill floor making it more worker friendly and improve our manual handling procedures.

These changes included

• raising the height of our skin off line by 500mm, lifting it about 457mm from the old existing line so the trimmers found it easier to trim the forequarters
• installed stands for the evisceration workers to stand on, this avoids the requirement to lift the gut up onto the evisceration table
• Wagstaff's have placed more overhead gates, which means carcass grading no longer requires carcases to be lifted onto specific rails
• the old metal grate stands have been replaced with new non slip surface stands.
  

With these few changes our work place injuries have been significantly reduced since we have reopened, especially those related to soft tissue injuries (back, shoulder, neck etc) and in addition cuts and laceration injuries are also down. It is also hoped that planned changes to plant layout and equipment will result in further reducing our manual handling risks.

MISS Training has conducted bandsaw training with all our bandsaw operators at three plants; this is a safety refresher course for bandsaw operators and proved to be very well accepted by the workers.

On the 19th of November 2014 we held a safety seminar which was open to the meat industry and was well attended, Craig Peacock (General Manager MISS Training) was MC for the day.

Presentations were given by

• Jaison McIntyre (VWA Inspector) - spoke on the Pillars/Planks of OHS from a VWA prospective
• Tony Kairouz (General Manager Cedar meats) - spoke of his commitment to WHS following an unfortunate incident he saw at his then Deniliquin abattoir back when he was 25 years old
• Paul Mitchell (Mentor HR/Wagstaff WHS Consultant) and myself spoke on the challenges that I have faced since becoming WHS Coordinator with Wagstaff Cranbourne.
  

We also discussed some of the difficulties I have come across trying to get other WHS Coordinators or WHS Managers to accept that we all face the same problems and if we could get together and talk about the problems it would benefit the meat industry and the safety of all our employees.

Please feel free to contact me, if you are looking for someone to bounce ideas off, I might not be able to solve the problem or have the right answer, but there could be another WHS Coordinator from another abattoir that would be able to assist you, if they have had a similar problem .
Ken Tierney - ohs@wagstaff.com.au

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