12/07/2023
🚧 Scaffolds and Scaffolding: Ensuring Safety at Heights! 🚧
Construction work commonly includes scaffolds, providing a safe, stable work platform when working at heights. Scaffolding is the individual components that, when assembled, form a scaffold—for example, tubes, couplers, and frames.
Scaffolding work means erecting, altering, or dismantling a temporary structure that supports a platform. The Guide to Scaffolds and Scaffolding has information on the types of scaffolds and their uses.
📍Licences
Scaffolding work involving a platform with a fall over 4 metres requires a high-risk work licence. There are 3 classes of scaffolding licence: basic, intermediate, and advanced. Contact your WHS regulator for more information on training and licences for scaffolding work.
📍WHS duties
Everyone in the workplace has WHS duties under the model WHS Act. You have specific duties if you are: a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU), a principal contractor, a designer, manufacturer, importer, supplier, installer of plant, substances or structures, or an officer. The model WHS Regulations have duties that apply to scaffolding work, including managing the risks of scaffolds, construction and falls from height.
As a PCBU, you must, so far as is reasonably practicable: ensure the health and safety of workers and others at your workplace, consult with workers who carry out work for the business or undertaking and who are (or are likely to be) directly affected by a health and safety matter, and consult, cooperate and coordinate activities with all other relevant duty holders.