Fire and Emergency's Critical Risks
At Fire and Emergency, we define critical risk as ‘the risks that most endanger our personnel, and if not adequately controlled could result in serious injury, illness or death’. We have identified three main critical risk areas:
- Physical safety,
- Work-related health, and
- Psychological wellbeing.
We have created a Critical Risk Portal page where you can learn more about our seven critical risks that personnel may be exposed to, the bowtie risk assessment methodology and critical risk summary one-pagers.
This programme of work aligns with the safety, health and wellbeing strategic roadmap, by increasing our people’s understanding of our critical risks and increasing confidence throughout the organisation in how we manage our critical risks.
As Critical Risk Management is a journey with no date of completion, we will continue to review the controls in place to ensure they are effective and look for continuous improvement opportunities.
We encourage you to take some time to familiarise yourself with the critical risks, think about the different types of work our people undertake and consider what some of the controls are that keep our people safe and well. We encourage you to have a kōrero with your peers about the different critical risks at your next brigade training night or team hui.
Our seven critical risks
- Vehicles
- Fire
- Hazardous substances
- Health impacts
- Psychological impacts
- Natural disasters and adverse weather events
- Working with water
Background
In 2022 a programme of work was established by the Safety, Health and Wellbeing Directorate to review our 13 critical risks and develop an organisational critical risk management framework to continue keeping our people safe, healthy and well.
The initial 13 critical risks were refined down to 7 critical risk categories, by grouping critical risks that had similar or the same controls in place.
We held a range of critical risk workshops in each region to engage with our people on what contributes to the critical risk, what are the existing controls in place and the effectiveness of those controls, and identify the improvement plans to continue strengthening controls in place to keep our people safe. From these workshops, we developed bowtie risk assessments. Bowtie is a commonly used risk assessment methodology to visualise a critical risk.
We then engaged with stakeholders from various business units to provide feedback on the controls and the identified improvement plans from each risk workshop.