As a Major Sharing initiative, Assist and Assure represents industry ‘best practice’ when it comes to safety. It focuses on safety conversations meant to ‘Assist’ employees and contractors drive output in a safe environment, and it ‘Assures’ us as a community (in a proactive manner) that the safety conversations are effective and that we continue to improve on our journey to consistent improvement in safety outcomes.
In early September, Safer Together Rig Site Safety Working Group (RSSWG) held a face-to-face Assist and Assure – Training and Best Practice Workshop in Brisbane that was attended by 30 representatives of 20 Safer Together Member Companies.
The RSSWG were excited to share the tool with other members within our industry, with the objective of the event being to extend the use of Assist and Assure more broadly through the industry.
The workshop achieved its goal in attracting a more diverse industry audience, with representatives from both operator and contractor companies, both upstream and downstream operations contributing to the day.
At its heart, Assist and Assure (A&A) is a leadership skills program focussing on engaging the workforce through 3 phases:
- Prepare well (transition to work)
- Safe Work Process (using the ‘Step 7’ planning prompts)
- Supervise effectively (before, during, and after work)
The workshop was made possible by the support of existing members giving their time.
Safer Together are very grateful for our presenters Alan Ruff (Service Delivery Manager, MPC Kinetic), Brian Donegan (Field Safety Program Advisor, Shell Australia) and Ross Clark (Assist and Assure Advisor, Shell Australia) for facilitating the workshop, and we would also like to thank Anthony Messina (Senior HSE Adviser Cooper Basin, Beach Energy), Corey Gabriel (Contract Manager QCLNG, UGL) and Haley Forbes (HSE Manager, Coho Resources) for sharing their experience of implementing the A&A program at their workplace.
In addition to sharing Implementation experience at the workshops we aim to continually improve our resources based on existing user experience and have recently updated the Step 7 card to facilitate a flow in conversation, and to provide users with more specific prompts at each of the 7 steps. The new cards are available on the website for Members to download and distribute to their workforce or order directly from our shop.
We would like to thank our Event sponsors, MPK Kinetic and Coho Resources for their contribution to the success of this great Event.
If you would like assistance to implement Assist and Assure in your workplace, please contact [email protected].
Resources are available for download from the Safer Together website.