JOHOR BAHRU: Malaysians need to look to Scandinavian countries to learn about improving occupational safety and health, said National Institute Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) chairman Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye.
He said that countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden are “exemplary in their occupational safety and health practice”.
Lee said that Australia and the United States are also good examples to follow but the Scandinavians are leaders in the area of making the workplace safe for the employees.
“They have excelled in their practice by making occupational safety and health part of their work culture.
“This has made them achieve almost zero to one accident per few thousand employees compared to Malaysia’s ratio of about 3.1 out of 1,000 workers,” he said in a press conference here recently.
Lee added that Malaysians were getting increasingly conscious about workplace safety as figures showed that occupational accidents have gone down by 50% in the past 10 years.
He was speaking after the launch of emergency response and fire response seminar at Niosh southern branch here.
Besides that, Lee advised employers not to put their workers’ safety at risk just for the sake of cutting costs in their respective organisations by not providing the right and adequate personal protection equipment.
“It is understandable that employers want to cut cost but it should not be done at the expense of sacrificing the employees’ safety,” he said.
He also said that employees who do not wear proper safety gear especially in high-risk industries like oil and gas, construction and chemical fields is an offence and the employers could be imposed a fine.
Source: Adopting good occupational safety and health practices by Yee Xiang Yun – The Star Online
