What is Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S)?
An important part of managing a school canteen is to ensure the health and safety of all canteen workers and visitors. This is carried out by taking two steps;
1. Firstly, making a commitment to safety and developing a policy statement (see sample template provided).
2. Secondly, the ongoing management of ensuring safety in the canteen is by taking a risk management approach, whereby, the risks are identified, assessed and controlled in a pro-active and ongoing manner, rather than waiting for an injury or accident to arise, before taking action.
The NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act 2000 (NSW OH&S Act) is the legislation that covers all NSW workplaces and describes the general requirements that ensure a safe and healthy workplace.
Under this legislation, the school canteen is a workplace, even if the workers are unpaid. This legislation imposes duty of care responsibilities on employers. For a school canteen, the “employer” may be the school’s P&C Association, the P&F, School Principal, or the Lessee. For those canteens that do not have any paid “employees”, the duty of care responsibilities lie with the school Principal, but the duties of assessment and training etc may be delegated to the Canteen Committee.
WorkCover NSW is the statutory authority that administers OH&S and compensation legislation and is responsible for workplace health, safety and welfare in NSW. WorkCover NSW can be contacted on 13 10 50 or at www.workcover.nsw.gov.au
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To heat or not to heat, that is the question. There wouldn’t be a wintery day that goes by without a child coming up to the canteen to ask if we could heat up their lunch for them. The issues with that are endless, and that’s just from a food safety point of view.