Are CCTV images available for workplace health and safety purposes?

If you travel on public transit, visit a public school, or simply walk in the hallway of your office building, there is a good chance your movements and actions are being caught on closed circuit television (CCTV). A 2007 ePolicy Institute survey found almost half (48%) of the companies surveyed use video monitoring to detect and discourage theft, violence and sabotage; some use CCTV to monitor work performance.  

Video monitoring and surveillance systems in the workplace are usually justified for public safety and the security of property.  What may be overlooked is their value to joint health and safety committees in investigating workplace hazards, injuries, and near misses.

Every institution or organization that has CCTV should have a policy regarding its live and recorded images.  Most jurisdictions have laws or guidelines for businesses and public bodies regarding CCTV (Guidelines for Overt Video Surveillance in the Private Sector March 2008  and Public Sector Surveillance Guidelines January 2014 are good examples of a concise, easy to follow guideline that addresses most privacy concerns).   These rules typically address purpose, signage and access but are often written from a privacy and security of property perspective; rarely do CCTV policies include worker health and safety among the reasons for surveillance.

Any business or institution with a CCTV installation should have policies that outline the purpose of surveillance and the rights of workers (and others) whose images are captured, recorded and retained.  A comprehensive policy will specifically address access  rights of workplace health and safety committees and safety officers to live or recorded images in carrying out their required duties.  Procedures will include specifics on how video records of workplace incidents, accidents and related events are requested and secured.  These video records are evidence that may have an important bearing on investigations into causation or proving adherence (or violation) of OH&S laws and regulations. 

Every place with a video camera is someone’s workplace.  A park is a groundskeeper’s workplace.  A transit platform is a transit attendant’s workplace.  A public hallway in a school is the workplace of custodians, teachers, teaching assistants, and others in the course of their employment (copier service technician, courier, fire inspector).  As you walk through your workplace and the workplaces of others that you encounter in your day, think about how the CCTV cameras you see could be used for worker health and safety purposes.  Here are a few examples to get you started:

A joint health and safety committee or safety officer could use CCTV to:

• Investigate the source of reported hazards (oil in a hall that is a risk of slips and falls)
• Confirm witness descriptions (a reported incident of an act of force by a dementia patient)
• Observe a specific risk (congestion in a passageway during a fire drill)
• Establish the sequence of events that led up to an injury

I’m neither advocating for more CCTV nor proposing new controls on CCTV use.  What I am suggesting is that every organization that uses CCTV (or any of the proliferating video capture technologies) explicitly address worker health and safety in their video surveillance policy and procedures.  Joint health and safety committees and corporate safety officers should review their access to video records for the health and safety purposes.  If no policy regarding the use of CCTV for worker health and safety currently exists, the issue should be addressed in the next policy review.  Once a policy does exist, workers and managers need to be made aware of the policy as it may pertain to them in the course of their employment.  This is critical to preserving the video record for potential use in the health and safety investigation.   

With the plunging cost of video capture and recording technologies and their growing use in workplaces, workplace injuries, exposures and risks will increasingly be captured in video records.  CCTV and other recorded images may be impersonal but their objective witness to events may reveal the cause of otherwise contentious injuries and exposures as well as expand opportunities to improve workplace health and safety. As the capture and retention of video images of people at work and in the course of their employment proliferates, policies that support their proper use for health and safety purposes need to be developed, formalized and maintained.    

Some Questions for Joint Health and Safety Committees (for a specific incident, near miss or health/safety issue):

• Would a video record of the incident assist in the investigation?
• Was the area of a reported hazard, incident, near miss or injury being examined by the committee under video surveillance? (This is an important question even if the incident is not on the employer’s worksite.)
• Does the current policy regarding video surveillance include worker health and safety within its purpose?
• Does the policy define the retention and terms of access for the committee?
• What are the procedures for the committee to request and view CCTV and other captured images for the purposes of carrying out their duties?

What, if anything, does a “near miss” have to do with health and safety?

“Well, no one died, so what’s the problem?”  I have heard lines like this before and I heard it again yesterday.  What irks me is that the people saying (or reported to have said) these words are often in supervisory or managerial positions.  Some even have a title or function that includes “safety and health”.  The truth is, the absence of injury is not a true measure of workplace health and safety.   And how a “near miss” is reported and reviewed reveals much about the safety culture of a workplace.

I instruct classes and seminars with learners and talk about safety with a lot of workers.  When I ask about their health and safety experiences, they often relate incidents like the following—serious incidents but without injury: 

•  The ladder I was on began to slide sideways and I had to jump off.     
•  The patient suddenly lost balance and collapsed on top of me.
•   The student I was helping impulsively started the drill press while my eye was next the bit aligning the project.    
• As I pulled out the top drawer, the file cabinet began to fall forward… I was just able to step out of the way before it went crashing to the floor.        
• Someone had sprayed a lubricant in the hallway and I nearly slipped and fell when I stepped in it.
• The metal plate broke loose from the winch and missed my toes by a fraction of an inch.

The workplaces above are varied:  a paint job on a residential site, a clinic, an industrial education shop in a school, an office, a hallway in a public building, a fabrication shop.  From an outcome perspective, there were no injuries, no lost days due to accidents, no need for doctor’s visits or alternate duties.  Yet, most of us would recognize that what separated the worker from injury in each case was a matter of luck (or millimetres) and not safety. 

Regardless of the workplace, each of the above incidents is a wake-up call, an opportunity to review the “near miss” to see if there are improvements or changes that might prevent a repeat of the incident.  Each case is worthy of an incident report and an investigation by the site safety committee. 

Safety is a function of the safeguards, barriers and defenses that protect workers from harm due to the hazards inherent in all workplaces.  Every near miss reveals active or latent defects in the barriers, safeguards and defenses that protect workers from harm.  Design, supervision, training, safe work procedures are some of the safeguards, barriers and defenses I’m talking about; an effective investigation will reveal the possible defects that had to align in order for the near miss to occur. 

If you are looking for a leading indicator of your workplace health and safety program, focus on incident or “near miss” reports.  How many are we getting?  Are they being investigated and discussed at the Joint Health and Safety Committee?  Are means of preventing future incidents being considered?  If incidents are not being reported, don’t assume they aren’t occurring.  And if incident reports are met with a “no one died” or “that’s just part of the job” sort of response, you’ll know a true concern for health and safety is not part of the culture of your workplace.  

How do I know if our Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee is effective?

The research literature reflects a consensus that effective joint occupational health and safety committees (JOHSCs) make a difference in the workplace.  Just because you have a JOHSC that meets the regulatory requirements, is properly constituted and meets regularly does not guarantee its effectiveness.  How would you assess the effectiveness of your committee? 

A good place to start is with the questions on the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) website at http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/hsprograms/hscommittees/effective.html: 

1.       Are members' duties clearly defined?
2.       Is a list of duties available to each member?
3.       Do members understand what their duties are?
4.       Do members carry out their duties?
5.       Is the structure and duties reviewed periodically and revised when necessary?
6.       Do members know the extent of their authority?
7.       Do members exceed their authority [or fail to address health and safety issues within their authority]?
8.       Are the chairperson's duties and authority clearly specified?
9.       Are the secretary's duties clearly specified? 

This is a great starting point in assessing the effectiveness of your JOHSC.  If all members of the JHSC have positive responses to all questions except 7, you have the makings of an effective committee.   I’ve added the clause shown in square brackets to question 7 for a reason.  If there is any doubt in the responses, mixed responses, or if you find question 7 responses depict a committee or its members exceeding their authority or failing to exercise their authority, your committee may not  working as effectively as it could.  In this case, failure to address substantive issues within a committee’s authority may be more serious than overzealousness.  If a committee’s members find they are continually bumping into issues that are beyond their understood authority, there may be something wrong with their understanding or the responsibilities and authority defined for the committee.  In either case, the health and safety of workers and other persons in the workplace may be at stake.  At a minimum, a “yes” answer to question 7 should spark some serious discussion.  

The CCOHS questions (with my proposed amendment to question 7) are internally focused.  A important measure of effectiveness is the degree to which the JOHSC is perceived by management and staff to be an important and potent facet of health and safety in the workplace.   So, I recommend adding the following question to the list:

10.    Do management and staff perceive the JOHSC to be effective?

There are many ways of informing a response to this question.  The methods include:

·         Directly asking managers and staff members the question in a staff survey
·         Counting of issues and questions referred to the committee as a performance measure
·         Tracking the number of page visits to the JOHSC minutes posted to the organization’s intranet site

Each of these or several in combination will provide an indicator of the importance and confidence workplace participants place on their JOHSC. 

If you are just starting a committee or looking for ways to improve its effectiveness,  WorkSafeBC offers a Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee Foundation Workbook.  The workbook is full of resources and space for committee members to develop and improve the operations of their committee.