The health & safety rabbit hole
In 2015 I wrote an article talking about my thoughts on the looming health and safety reforms from a parkour perspective. Besides cringing at reading old writing (like listening to your own voice?), my opinions have only been reinforced by experiences in the world of parkour, play, and parenting. I was given the prompt to write this topic again after reading an article series on ‘overprotective parenting’ that pulls together themes relating to the myths and realities of childhood risks and health and safety. As a proponent of ‘free-range parenting’ and working as a play advocate in the public sector I lapped it up. Indeed, I’m fascinated by the discussions and decisions that surround health and safety. I say fascinated, I mean vexed.
My professional life revolves around informal play and parkour, and I cross the boundary between the academic and non-academic worlds. I feel privileged to be able to help improve the quantity and quality of these opportunities in global, national, and local scales. These opportunities give me insights into the work of international and national sports federations, regional sports trusts, local government, and schools (additionally, I’m a parent of two school-age children and have many friends in a similar stage of life). I believe that one of the common roadblocks (real and perceived) to empowering play opportunities across these spaces are simplistic and/or uninformed interpretations of health and safety.
The Art of Manliness article is a great synthesis on the topic of the risks of not letting people take risks (here it is again, go and read it all). I’m hopeful that this information will continue to spread and improve people’s approaches to risk, health and safety, and how they parent and/or relate to the children in their lives. But I haven’t seen a lot written on the implications this data and the associated topics have for the legislation, compliance culture, and the systems and practices that surround health and safety in the workplace. What are the risks of not letting people take risks to organisations? Are there alternative approaches or modifications we can make to our current practices that would improve health and safety, and indeed wellbeing? And what should stakeholders in the play, active recreation, and sport industry do about it? Let’s talk about it!
Before we start, two quick provisos about my way of understanding health and safety:
Hazard ≠ Risk: This infographic is handy way to differentiate the two. In Aotearoa New Zealand, however, I sometimes see risk being used to describe a hazard. I think that’s a problem, because it can stop discussions about context, likelihood, and effective mitigation strategies. I.e. sometimes the mere existence of a hazard stops a project without exploring ways to reduce the risks associated with that hazard and gain the benefit(s) of the project.
Risk is neutral: Most definitions or understandings of risk highlight its noun form, “exposure to the chance of injury or loss”, but I prioritise its verb form “to venture upon; take or run the chance of”. Risk as ‘chance’ means that risk is neutral, there could be a risk of X (negative consequence) or a risk of Y (positive consequence). Privileging negative consequences without considering positive consequences encourages risk aversion.
So instead of the colloquial term of risk, I’ll try and say hazard, and when I’m talking about risks, I’ll try to refer to positive or negative risk outcomes, and when I do say risk, I’m using it as described above.
Here are the issues I’m going to tackle:
We often have more concern for policy than training.
We have prioritised corporate over individual responsibility.
We focus more on acute health and safety concerns than on holistic and long-term wellbeing.
On one hand, we adopt a one-size-fits all approach to health and safety ignoring the importance of context.
On the other hand, we privilege certain contexts and ignore valid health and safety issues.
We use western approaches to health and safety and fail to draw on maatauranga Maaori.
We have let health and safety become a scapegoat.
We often have more concern for policy than training.
If you’re reading from outside Aotearoa New Zealand, a tragic mining accident here in 2010 helped trigger significant health and safety reforms resulting in the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015. The intent of these reforms was to reduce mortality rates in high-risk industry. But how do we go about responding to these reforms in a typical office environment often removed from such high-risk jobs? Write a policy and put up another sign. I’m generalising of course, but I am legitimately concerned that compliance culture is causing organisations in non-high-risk industry to control for hazards in a way that reduces people’s ability to learn how to be safe. I’m concerned that the long-term implications of this way of operating will reduce people’s abilities to navigate hazards and reduce negative risk outcomes.
Logic would suggest that safe people make fewer mistakes and better know how to reduce negative risk outcomes in any environment, but unsafe people are more likely to get hurt no matter the circumstances. In my 2015 article I said that no matter how rigorous, restrictive, and ‘safe’ you make a policy or an environment, there will always be somebody who finds a way to get hurt. Indeed, my personal experience in the play world tells me that the ‘safer’ the environment, the greater danger people will often put themselves in, and the more chances they’ll take. Policy is necessary and valuable, especially when education, indeed training, is a key mitigation strategy. However, I often don’t see that being emphasised. The education component focuses on reading the policy and the training neglects the literal physical training of the body to better move through the environment. The ability to read does not improve your ability to lift your foot over a step, only walking on steps can do that.
We know that training makes a difference, and we invest in programmes such as road safety and water safety to support people’s wellbeing. Driving can be dangerous, but we don’t ban driving and we don’t put hand railings up along all our streets. We put our drivers through training, and before that even happens, Ruben the Road Safety Bear comes into our early childhood environments and we build a whole culture of learning to navigate that part of our world more safely. We do put fences up around pools, but we don’t ban swimming and we don’t drain bodies of water. We acknowledge that living on an island means that water is part of life, so we embed swimming and water safety training it into our school system. In recent health and safety news, Wellington City Council removed a playground slide following recent injuries. Matthew Beres, Wellington City Council ‘play spaces specialist’ is quoted as saying “You can put [up] all the signage in the world but [it] comes down to personal responsibility”. That’s right, the signs (e.g. traditional policy approaches) might not make the difference. In fact, parents were putting their young children up the ladder so they could access the slide. Children are much safer when they only go as far as they feel comfortable, rather than being manipulated by adult means. Hence the oft-used maxim taught in our local parkour classes of “don’t go anywhere you can’t get back from”. Local Authorities once again need to play a broad role in promoting the social, economic, environmental, and cultural wellbeing of their communities. But removing the slide as an act of health and safety compliance, doesn’t support the long-term wellbeing of residents (more on that later), i.e., it doesn’t support new parents and their kids to better understand slides and speed. Indeed, it doesn’t consider the value of education and training as tools to mitigate negative risk outcomes.
A systematic review on the relationship between risky outdoor play and health in children by Brussoni and colleagues identifies that engaging in risk is one of the key components necessary for children to learn how to be safe. In a play context that means we need to let kids play, because there are greater benefits in engaging in this behaviour than by avoiding it. In the adult world training is perhaps a good parallel to children’s play, it is a great tool for learning. Why then are we sometimes more concerned about telling people to watch out for the step than training them to step over it? We should spend more time engaging with risk and learning how to prevent negative risk outcomes by training.
ACTION: Health and safety culture (processes, documentation, and personnel) needs to acknowledge that learning to navigate risk is an important part of the mitigation of negative risk outcomes. More effort needs to be placed on educating and training people on how to move and interact with their world and workplace to support desired health and safety outcomes.
We prioritise corporate over individual responsibility.
Health and safety practices have changed a lot over the last couple of centuries, and absolutely for the better. The notion of ‘duty of care’ for instance is significant and ensures that employers take steps to protect and care for their people. It seems like these health and safety obligations (my critiques not withstanding) are increasingly well taken care of. However, the emphasis on PCBU (Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking) responsibility is spilling over into the curbing of individuals’ freedoms that I think pose alternative health and safety concerns. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the 1800s, but the significant focus on these duties feels like it’s starting to swing too far in the other direction and erode personal responsibility.
For instance, organisations exercising their duty of care have told many a skateboarder, parkour practitioner, climber, and child (I’m sure there are more examples too) to stop what they’re doing and leave in the name of health and safety. I’m sceptical that this has any real basis in a concern for people’s wellbeing and is instead squarely focused on health and safety compliance due to the focus on PCBU liability. The WorkSafe policy clarification: Recreational access and the Health and Safety at Work Act (2015) (HSWA) is a brilliant and logical piece of work championed by Recreation Aotearoa that helps in this regard. It clarifies that “a PCBU whose land is being accessed for recreation is only responsible for risks* arising from the work or workplace, and is not responsible for the risks* associated with the recreational activities” adding that “[the] HSWA doesn’t cover injuries sustained by someone who’s accessed land for recreation and hurts themselves as a result of the recreational activity” (*NOTE: This is WorkSafe’s usage of the term risk, not mine). Parkour NZ has drawn on this policy clarification as part of its participation in the new Movement Card initiative. The Movement Card is a tool to support participants, and stakeholders they interact with, to understand the rites of using public space for recreation, and that naturally involves conversations about health and safety.
One of the big shifts starting to happen that draws on these cultures of reinterpreting the landscape and using it creatively for play, is considering how to build that vision into landscape and architecture in the first place. In other words, cities are starting to go beyond playgrounds and parks as play spaces and are starting to explore what it means for the whole city to be playable (see the Hamilton City Council Play Strategy – it’s my job it help activate it). Unfortunately, the only standards relating to play are the playground safety standards, and these can curtail some creative and forward-thinking ideas because of its rigidity. Furthermore, as I mentioned in the previous section, trying to iron out negative risk outcomes often creates new ones. For example, some soft-fall surfaces are incredibly slippery in the wet. When opportunities to engage with risk are removed, playgrounds become boring and may cause young people to make choices that increase the likelihood of negative risk outcomes (e.g. riding your bike or skateboard down the slide because it’s not fast enough). Increasing the gaps between play assets to create ‘safe’ fall zones creates a similar issue, as a bigger gap requires a bigger jump.
Returning to personal responsibility, consider formal organised sport for a moment. Injury on the sports field is almost a given when we watch professional sport. We tend not to challenge this because we recognise that athletes undergo a training to do the things they do. It’s appropriate for them to be moving and interacting with the world and each other in these ways. But when we leave the world of professional sport, we throw those notions out the window and start projecting our own (in)competencies onto others. This creates imbalances in how people are treated in public space. The professional skateboarder is much more likely to be told to leave for ollieing down the staircase than the elderly person with the history of falls is for walking down the staircase. The likelihood of harm may be greater for the elderly person, but because people are more familiar with walking and less familiar with ollies, they are treated differently. Passers-by can often be heard saying “you’re going to hurt yourself” or “what you’re doing is dangerous”. Put this interpretation inside a security guard, property owner, or other person with responsibilities relating to safety of an area, however, and you have immediate marginalisation of play and recreation. Even if the negative risk outcomes to those individuals are negligible or has nothing do with the PCBU’s workplace, the priority has become to protect the organisation and not let people make decisions about their own livelihoods.
ACTION: Workplaces need to ensure that their corporate practices (aimed at supporting their workers) do not impede individuals from exercising their right to recreate in public and learn to navigate risk on their own terms. To support this, we need to grow the awareness and understanding of play within staff who interact with the public. Furthermore, the development of new approaches and standards to conceptualise play within health and safety outside traditional spaces and places may support the differentiation and boundaries between corporate and individual responsibility.
We focus more on acute, immediate health and safety concerns than on holistic and long-term wellbeing.
Or perhaps an alternative title could be “Our focus on safety sometimes neglects health”.
The way I see health and safety being discussed in the workplace and in the media often focuses on acute health and safety. Yes, employers want to make sure their office staff have an ergonomic workstation so they don’t get RSI, those working outside are provided with sunblock to prevent against melanoma, and appropriate PPE controls are in place for dealing with asbestos so people don’t get lung disease. But much of the dialogue is around immediate impacts, “get home safe” is the catch cry. This acute health and safety approach flows beyond the doors of the workplace building into other locations, heavily influencing decisions regarding things like playground design, outdoor education, activities allowed in public space, and other policies, procedures, that influence decision-making around play opportunities. The lack of consideration that acute health and safety focuses have on long term health and safety is unfortunate.
In projects where I and others have been encouraging a more holistic approach to health and safety, rebuttals from people with decision making power have come in the vein of “how would you feel being the person whose door gets knocked on to tell you that someone has died or been seriously hurt?”. I understand the sentiment, but when we make those comments, we’re ignoring the inverse issues with the current status quo. Professor and psychologist Dr Peter Gray contends that the decline in play opportunities due to risk aversion is contributing to sharp increases in narcissism, depression, anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and suicide in children. A health and safety consultant I met with explained increasing issues relating to young workforce entrants not having the same risk assessment skills as previous generations, perhaps due to reduced risk-taking opportunities. My return question then is how do you feel right now about perpetuating a system that is enhancing risk aversion, that in turn, is making people less safe and contributing to other significant long-term health issues? The long-term impact of taking risks is well documented within early childhood and play literature, but the status quo shows that we’ve forgotten that it’s supposed to be about health and safety. Focusing on acute concerns ignores the fact that taking risks has positive outcomes. Indeed, in the world of play, taking risks is an important part of good health and safety, especially for teaching children how to navigate hazards safely and develop sound risk-assessment processes into adulthood.
In fact, there is some evidence showing that taking risks reduces injury in the short term. A recent ABC article on a day-care centre in Australia modifying its play space to enable more risk-taking found that children experienced less injuries when exposed to more risk-taking opportunities. This mirrors the experience of one of our home-grown play experiments: Bruce McLachlan (Principal, at the time) of Swanson School signed the school up to participate in an Otago/AUT University study on the impact play has on bullying. The school took the project even further and ended up removing the playground rules by no longer saying ‘no’ or ‘stop’ to children’s play choices. I had the pleasure of meeting and talking in-depth with Bruce about the project, and he said that not only did it almost eradicate bullying, but there were also fewer injuries in the 6 years under this regime than the previous 6. Unfortunately, despite this growing wealth of evidence, there’s been limited uptake of the same approach in other Aotearoa New Zealand primary schools (perhaps because of the next issue I’ll cover).
There are experts and tools available to support a shift away from this risk aversion, however. Independent researcher Tim Gill, for instance, author of No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society, is a big proponent of risk benefit assessment (RBA). RBA is a risk assessment process that includes positive risk outcomes (i.e. benefits) as part of the mitigation analysis. Another valuable tool is Dynamic Risk Assessment, this process takes RBA concepts into live scenarios and is common in emergency services but is also essentially the same process used by the likes of playworkers, lifeguards, and parkour coaches.
ACTION: The sector needs to understand and respond to the evidence of the importance of risk and the positive risk outcomes. This should ensure long-term impacts of health and safety are always part of consideration, drawing on academic research to make accurate assessments. Furthermore, I recommend an enthusiastic adoption of Risk Benefit Assessment and Dynamic Risk Assessment processes as key components within project management.
On one hand, we adopt a one-size-fits all approach to health and safety ignoring the importance of context.
The Pike River Mine tragedy catalysed some important health and safety reforms to, importantly, reduce mortality rates in high-risk industry. The motivation to abide by the legislation should of course be to look after the wellbeing of staff and others, but the excuse highlighted most often seems to be the fear of being found guilty of reckless conduct: “Section 47 (reckless conduct in respect of duty that exposes an individual to a risk of serious injury, serious illness, or death): Five years in prison or $600,000 fine, or both.” All PCBU’s are subject to the same legislation, so officers of PCBU’s in all areas of industry could face these penalties for health and safety duty offences. I have no comment on the penalties themselves, but the blanket application of the legislation without relevant (and in-depth) supporting information in non-high-risk industry is a concern because it encourages risk aversion in areas where this is unwarranted, and potentially harmful for reasons already stated. My experience in recent years has highlighted numerous situations where children’s freedoms and play opportunities are kerbed in the name of health and safety (not wellbeing, mind you) meant for high-risk industry.
The Art of Manliness series outlines some of the negative risk outcomes of not letting kids play how they want. OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) further highlight that,
When adults want to protect children from any element of physical risk, however small and go out of their way to record even the most minor of injuries, what's the impact? Children learn that you should be fearful of trying new things and challenges.
Indeed, a quote from a teacher I once met reinforces this idea perfectly: “Kids won’t take risks in their learning anymore… hold on… I just need to go and tell that kid outside to stop climbing that tree”. In another instance, a school had purchased a double-sided netball/basketball hoop but subsequently refused to put it up because of health and safety fears (i.e. kids might run into the pole and fall over and die), despite also having expensive goalpost padding for the pole. The irony is that it sat unsecured on the ground in an area of the school where children could climb on it whilst it rocked and shifted under them. A health and safety consultant shared further examples with me of schools who were focusing on the wrong things, such as banning rough and tumble games and tree climbing because of fears of broken bones whilst neglecting much more important factors like having poisons in reach of children and flammable liquids near kilns.
Boards of Trustees (BOT) and Principals are overreacting to the heavy penalties set in place for examples like Pike River and applying the same lens to the school environment. The context they work in (the education and wellbeing of children) is not the same as high-risk industry. It seems that the WorkSafe FAQs for schools is inadequate for a BOT or Principal ruminating on the maximum fines and imprisonment for negligence, otherwise we wouldn’t see such draconian removal of children’s play freedoms. Even direct statements like “we haven’t prosecuted [schools] just because a child fell out of a tree… Why not? Because it's not reasonable to expect schools to stop kids being kids and taking low-level risks” and the broader myth busting section haven’t stopped schools banning tree climbing and other children’s games. (For the record, the times that WorkSafe has prosecuted a school or ECE are for legitimate incidents and not, as they say, issues relating to ‘letting kids be kids’. Further, nothing I can find has resulted in imprisonment or principals losing their houses and some serious cases have resulted in enforceable undertakings without fines).
Context matters, and without high level clarifications in the legislation itself, or support information from the agencies who can enable or disable play opportunities, risk aversion is escalating removing more play freedoms and exacerbating all the negative outcomes discussed.
ACTION: WorkSafe and the Ministry of Education should issue a policy clarification and/or develop a resource similar to the UK Health and Safety Executive’s Children’s Play and Leisure – Promoting a Balanced Approach “to make sure that mistaken health and safety concerns do not create sterile play environments that lack challenge and so prevent children from expanding their learning and stretching their abilities.”
On the other hand, we privilege certain contexts and ignore valid health and safety concerns.
We also treat situations in different industries and facets of life in unequal ways. In the playground world you must have ‘fall attenuating’ surfaces for any asset that could involve a fall from 600mm or above. I come up against asset owners scared to push the boundary with anything when it comes to play because of these standards. Yet we approach our roads entirely differently. The illustrations powerfully convey this imbalance. The first image translates to “The injuries the body suffers in a collision at 70km/hr correspond to a fall from the sixth floor of a high-rise building. If the speed is 50km/hr, the collision corresponds to a fall from the third story”. We put measures in place in playgrounds to try and stop children from experiencing negative acute risk outcomes of any kind, even from low heights. Yet these same children can step outside their front doors into speeding traffic, or as the second image creatively pictures, down into the chasm beside the footpath, no rubber or handrails in site. We design risk taking out of playgrounds creating potential long-term issues, and do next to nothing about situations where real harm can occur; we privilege vehicles and traffic flow over children, regardless of the greater negative risk outcomes.
I recently conducted a short review of council berm policies from around the country to better understand opportunities for landscaping and play opportunities in the road reserve. I was encouraged to see some progressive policies and design guidelines in Australia and the USA, but local council’s here often make the following claim, “The berm outside your property should be free of plants or shrubs to ensure safe use of the road for all road users”. Are you kidding? At school pick up time cars are parked all over the grass berm, footpaths, and driveways near my house. The manicured plant free lawn that is enabling poor health and safety situations. This is doing the opposite of ensuring the “safe use of road for all road users”. I see no logical argument that makes a potential leafy trip hazard being more hazardous than a vehicle collision, especially with children in the mix.
The work on Play Streets around the country over the last year has begun to make a dent in this space, but it has further revealed some of these imbalances concerning health and safety in regard to our roads. First, the current process to formally play in a low-traffic street (e.g., single game of pick-up basketball in a cul-de-sac) requires the same process as if you were conducting significant earthworks. The health and safety concerns from these activities are not comparable. Looming changes to COPTTM, however, may change this. Second, if I use the berm example again, on one hand, residents are tasked with maintaining the berm for the safety of others even though they don’t own them. On the other hand, some councils have been reticent to proactively support play streets concepts because they don’t want to accept any responsibility, even though they own the road reserve and could improve the safety of any current informal play street practices.
I don’t think we should adopt a playground safety standard approach to our roads but increasing the child-friendly nature of these spaces would be a good step. The UNICEF Child-Friendly Cities initiative identifies that “every child has the right to grow up in an environment where they feel safe . . . can play, learn and grow and where their voice is heard and matters”. The road reserve is the largest public space we have available in our cities, and it wasn’t that long ago that playing in the streets was commonplace. Bigger and faster vehicles, however, are contributing to the loss of this play space, and children’s voices and their legitimate health and safety issues are not being factored heavily enough into our transport and district planning.
ACTION: To meet the four wellbeings mandate, all our cities should buy into the UNICEF Child-Friendly Cities initiative and let that challenge infiltrate the health and safety considerations of transport and district planning. Furthermore, an investigation into the obligations and taken for granted behaviour that local government has that might undermine such wellbeing attempts and perpetuate some of these double standards is warranted.
We use western approaches to health and safety and fail to draw on maatauranga Maaori.
Noo Ingarangi me Kotimana ooku tiipuna, he Paakehaa ahau. My ancestors came from England and Scotland, so I am not Maaori. But studying Te Reo Maaori Level 2 back in 2012 and various opportunities since then, especially the current cultural capability journey with Sport Waikato, is growing my understanding and appreciation of Te Ao Maaori, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and maatauranga Maaori. Maatauranga Maaori, or Maaori knowledge, refers to the various philosophies, traditions, values, and concepts stemming from a Maaori world view and often involves an overlap between humanity and the environment. As fellow TEDx Ruakura speaker Dr Curtis Bristowe reminds us in his TEDx talk of the same name, indigenous knowledge has value.
Despite many people understanding Aotearoa New Zealand to be a bicultural nation (i.e. Maaori and non-Maaori), all the tools and concepts regarding health and safety I’ve discussed are built off primarily Western health and safety frameworks. Growing resurgences of maatauranga Maaori around the country provide a great opportunity to consider indigenous ways of understanding health and safety. One such opportunity comes via the Atua Matua Health Framework, developed by Dr Ihirangi Heke. It “uses traditional Māori environmental knowledge to understand health from an indigenous perspective”, and as I understand it, it focuses on physical activity being an incidental part of connection with taiao (the environment), rather than the primary focus. I had the privilege of reading and giving some feedback on Ngaa Tohutaka Taio, an early draft of Ihi’s understanding of health and safety in outdoor education via Atua Matua. Tohutaka is concerned with reading signs in the environment (stars, weather, animals, trees, seasons, etc.) to determine appropriate timings for participation. This is in line with the resurgence and process of using the Maramataka (Maaori lunar calendar).
These concepts represent a very different way of understanding activity in the outdoors, but ones that have much to offer. Tamihao Serancke (Maaori Academic), quoted in the linked Atua Matua documented, says:
. . . any teaching and learning must be imbued with equal spaces of Māori knowledge, as well as their non-Māori counterparts/Western ways of thinking. The Atua Matua Health Framework refocuses Māoritanga (Māori concepts) at the core, does not ignore other views or values, but indeed invites holistic approaches within the applied practices and protocols of this space, both Tākaro (Māori games) and Sport, Fitness, Recreation.
Health and safety is an essential aspect of the applied practices and protocols of ‘this space’. I have only a rudimentary knowledge of these concepts, but I can say with certainty that they are not being applied to health and safety approaches in the spaces I’m aware of.
All PCBUs have health and safety obligations, but crown entities also have obligations under settlement treaty acts that sometimes speak to recreation. For instance, the Waikato-Tainui Raupatu Claims (Waikato River) Settlement Act 2010, includes the following objectives:
(b) the restoration and protection of the relationships of Waikato-Tainui with the Waikato River, including their economic, social, cultural, and spiritual relationships:
(c) the restoration and protection of the relationships of Waikato River iwi according to their tikanga and kawa with the Waikato River, including their economic, social, cultural, and spiritual relationships:
(d) the restoration and protection of the relationships of the Waikato Region’s communities with the Waikato River, including their economic, social, cultural, and spiritual relationships:
(k) the restoration of water quality within the Waikato River so that it is safe for people to swim in and take food from over its entire length:
(l) the promotion of improved access to the Waikato River to better enable sporting, recreational, and cultural opportunities:
(m) the application to the above of both maatauranga Maaori and the latest available scientific methods.
Surely this is a reason to ensure that relevant organisations are building the appropriate relations to draw on maatauranga Maaori to support health and safety decision making? For local government in particular, we can also look at Ārewa ake te Kaupapa (Raising the platform), the interim report as part of the future of local government review. It suggests that future local government “will build on Te Ao Māori and mātauranga Māori and embody genuine Treaty partnership based on shared wellbeing for future generations”. To support the wellbeing of future generations and ensure the play aspirations of Maaori are being realised, we need to shift the dial on current Western only health and safety practices.
My friend Watene Hema, a participant on some of Ihi’s Atua Matua courses recently told me about Nic Low’s new book Uprising. The book is a recounting of Nic’s expeditions through Kaa Tiritiri-o-te-Moana (the Southern Alps) where he used traditional oral maps to connect with the stories and histories of his ancestors. An RNZ interview with Nic revealed a powerful message, “you can’t learn anything if you treat old knowledge as dead . . . assume it’s alive and trying to tell you something.” When it comes to health and safety in the world of play, active recreation, and sport, what ways are we treating maatauranga maaori as alive and trying to tell us something?
ACTION: Health and safety policies, plans, procedures, etc. need to incorporate maatauranga Maaori especially when it pertains to supporting the play, active recreation, and sporting aspirations of Maaori.
We have let health and safety become a scapegoat
Conversations with friends and colleagues have highlighted that almost everyone has a story ending in “you can’t do that because of health and safety.” I have concerns about the full picture of health and safety when this line is used to kill an idea. I have especially large concerns when it harms opportunities to learn how to navigate risks and prevents reasonable opportunities for play, active recreation, and sport. When I’ve raised this with people who work in specific health and safety roles, some have scoffed and said that people use health and safety as an excuse, and often haven’t done the necessary due diligence to understand the real project risks and mitigation options. That is, sometimes the decision is made to unnecessarily curtail an idea before health and safety personnel are even involved. Indeed, digging a bit deeper revealed situations where health and safety was the excuse that stopped a project but there was never any kind of project plan or risk assessment to understand what the hazards were, what the negative risk outcomes could be, mitigation strategies, and what the benefits of the project would be. Resourcing may have been a key factor in not being able to carry out this work, but health and safety was the excuse.
Why do people with decision-making power make such calls without exploring the facts? Perhaps because the project scares them, and they fear being in a headline. It’s true, the media literary focuses more of its energy on perpetuating negative news stories. As Steven Pinker writes:
Media scholars who tally news stories of different kinds, or present editors with a menu of possible stories and see which they pick and how they display them, have confirmed that the gatekeepers prefer negative to positive coverage . . . That in turn provides an easy formula for pessimists on the editorial page: make a list of all the worst things that are happening anywhere on the planet that week, and you have an impressive-sounding—but ultimately irrational—case that civilization has never faced greater peril.
That system has given rise to what’s called the Availability Heuristic. It is easier for us to recall catastrophic events than conventional ones. Although it doesn’t mention the heuristic explicitly, that’s what the Art of Manliness series on parenting discusses when it highlights how parents make decisions based on horrible news, despite the evidence showing that the world has never been safer. The irony of many parents’ response to traffic concerns is doing the exact opposite of what the evidence says. They stop their children from walking and cycling to school and playing in the neighbourhood in favour of driving them and having them play indoors, despite two of the most dangerous places for children are being a passenger in a motor vehicle and being at home.
Likewise, the fears that project managers and other leaders might have regarding a project or decision to support play, active recreation, and sport may draw on the same Availability Heuristic. The fear of the extreme and unlikely negative risk outcomes ignores all the data on the everyday positive risk outcomes. When there’s no actual depth behind the statement “you can’t do that because of health and safety”, it turns health and safety into a scapegoat. This damages the health and safety process, damages opportunities to support holistic wellbeing, and undermines the purpose health and safety itself. Flippantly dismissing ideas ‘because of health and safety’ is ignoring everything that I’ve been unpacking in this essay and reeks of below the line thinking. This growing culture of risk aversion, coupled with its genesis of the ‘health and safety gone mad’ brigade, have turned health and safety into a dirty word (okay three words). But it shouldn’t be, as health and safety is supposed to protect and enrich us. Ultimately, if that’s to truly be the case, to quote a slide from a WorkSafe introduction to the health and safety reforms, “to make a real difference, we need to change our attitudes to health and safety”.
ACTION: As with the acute vs long-term health and safety section, the sector needs to seek out and respond accordingly to the everyday evidence and not make decisions because of the news or otherwise out of fear.
Conclusion
Despite my passion and knowledge of the topic this was a difficult article to write because all of these concepts overlap with one another in different ways. There’s no simple progression from one idea to the next as the whole system needs improvement. I think that initiatives both big and small, national and local will begin to help develop a more holistic and complete understanding of health and safety in ways that better support play. However, some of these can be a bit chicken and egg, so it really does require people to step up in all kinds of areas and positions to make a difference.
What do you think of my critique? Is it valid? Is anybody doing anything like this already? Who wants to collaborate on something?
SUMMARY OF ACTIONS:
Health and safety culture (processes, documentation, and personnel) needs to acknowledge that learning to navigate risk is an important part of the mitigation of negative risk outcomes. More effort needs to be placed on educating and training people on how to move and interact with their world and workplace to support desired health and safety outcomes.
Workplaces need to ensure that their corporate practices (aimed at supporting their workers) do not impede individuals from exercising their right to recreate in public and learn to navigate risk on their own terms. To support this, we need to grow the awareness and understanding of play within staff who interact with the public. Furthermore, the development of new approaches and standards to conceptualise play within health and safety outside traditional spaces and places may support the differentiation and boundaries between corporate and individual responsibility.
The sector needs to understand and respond to the evidence of the importance of risk and the positive risk outcomes. This should ensure long-term impacts of health and safety are always part of consideration, drawing on academic research to make accurate assessments. Furthermore, I recommend an enthusiastic adoption of Risk Benefit Assessment and Dynamic Risk Assessment processes as key components within project management.
WorkSafe and the Ministry of Education should issue a policy clarification and/or develop a resource similar to the UK Health and Safety Executive’s Children’s Play and Leisure – Promoting a Balanced Approach “to make sure that mistaken health and safety concerns do not create sterile play environments that lack challenge and so prevent children from expanding their learning and stretching their abilities.”
To meet the four wellbeings mandate, all our cities should buy into the UNICEF Child-Friendly Cities initiative and let that challenge infiltrate the health and safety considerations of transport and district planning. Furthermore, an investigation into the obligations and taken for granted behaviour that local government has that might undermine such wellbeing attempts and perpetuate some of these double standards is warranted.
Health and safety policies, plans, procedures, etc. need to incorporate maatauranga Maaori especially when it pertains to supporting the play, active recreation, and sporting aspirations of Maaori.
As with the acute vs long-term health and safety section, the sector needs to seek out and respond accordingly to the everyday evidence and not make decisions because of the news or otherwise out of fear.
