By NZISM Secretary
22/09/2021
With the recent terrorist incident in Auckland a few weeks ago, it’s a timely reminder that keeping our workplaces safe and secure for employees and customers needs to be a priority for all organisations that own, manage or create crowded places.
As a member of Crowded Places Business Advisory Group (BAGNZ), I represent our members in this collaborative working group made up of individuals from selected national and/or sector groups. The objective of the Advisory Group is to combine the resources and goodwill of members to increase the capability across New Zealand businesses to Deter, Detect, Delay, and Respond to an attack or similar incident.
The BAGNZ has been established to promote information and tools associated with protecting crowded places, share information and support the implementation of strategies in their sector, and to encourage good practice approaches relating to the protection of crowded places from a potential attack or similar incident.
I’d like to encourage members to read and get familiar with Protecting Our Crowded Places from Attack: New Zealand’s Strategy.
The key message we need to ensure our workplaces know is that if an incident takes place, we must ESCAPE. HIDE. TELL. We want this message to become as common as DROP. COVER. HOLD, which is well known across Aotearoa in the event of an earthquake.
Apart from ensuring you’re familiar with the strategy, we’d like to encourage businesses that manage, own or create crowded places to undertake a self-assessment, to better understand their security risks. The NZ Police website has some useful self-assessment tools.
All New Zealanders are responsible for helping to detect and prevent attacks in crowded places. The Health and Safety Profession has a key role in supporting their organisations and clients to assess, understand, mitigate, and monitor their risks associated with crowded places.
Ngā mihi nui,
Selena
Thank you for joining the Women in Safety Excellence (WISE) network.
We hold various online and face-to-face events throughout the year and if one occurs near you, we would love to meet you in person.
LinkedIn - Please make sure you join our LinkedIn group to stay connected and on top of our planned webinars and events. We encourage you to post anything in the WISE group page that you think other network members would find useful or inspiring. Please don't be shy. The more we reach out, the more we connect with each other, and the more we can help each other on our journeys.
We might send you the occasional email but our web page on the NZISM website is always the best place to go for an overview of what's coming up in the WISE calendar.
Best wishes,
Margaret van Schaik
WISE Chair