Dr Paul Oldershaw received the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s SHP IOSH Awards. Here, the Olympic Delivery Authority’s head of health and safety, Lawrence Waterman, explains why he was a worthy winner.
“This year’s IOSH Lifetime Achievement Award winner is the first occupational hygienist on the Award’s prestigious list – previous winners include a politician, a judge, an epidemiologist, safety practitioners, two business leaders, a campaigner, an occupational physician, and a trades unionist.
“It’s extraordinary to reflect on the wide range of skills and backgrounds that have combined to enhance the efforts to protect the health and safety of people at work. But, in many ways, for the Award to go to an occupational hygienist, who has worked most of his life within an organisation largely focused on accident prevention, is a good way of marking the maturity of the award itself.
“Paul Oldershaw is a postgraduate chemist from UMIST, with his roots in the North West of England. His early career saw him exposed to phosgene, which, as well as physically affecting him, also served to shape his future approach to workplace health and safety. This was a time when the HSE was recruiting ahead of the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 and although he nearly didn’t get in (a junior administrator initially rejected Paul’s application, as he didn’t appear to have a BSc, yet his CV cited his doctorate), he ended up staying with the regulator for the rest of his working life.
“After the usual year as a general inspector, he became a specialist inspector in Cricklewood, carrying out many asbestos surveys. He also spent a period back in Manchester in the field consultancy, before returning to north London to head the Fibre section. While there was, and still is, a lot to do with asbestos and worker exposures, it was the new challenge of chemical exposure limits that ended up dominating his work and shaped his unique and important contribution.
“In safety terms, risk assessments are, legally, relatively new – although arguably implied by s2 of the HSWA 1974, they really became mainstream with the Management Regulations in the early 1990s. But occupational hygiene was around long before, defining itself as the science of recognition, evaluation and control of hazards to health in the workplace. That process of evaluation is a risk assessment by another name, and the key to it was an understanding of the relationship between exposure and health harm. Just as we have notions in everyday life of thresholds below which harm is unlikely to arise – you can drink some alcohol and it’s probably OK, but a great deal will impair health, similarly with consumption of fatty foods – so, in the workplace, the search was on to define levels of airborne contaminants below which workers’ health would be protected. The development in the UK of a system for setting chemical exposure limits; servicing the Advisory Committee on Toxic Substances; managing the process for pesticides approval – these became the focal points of Paul Oldershaw’s professional life and the influence of his approach has been felt around the world.
“The most significant development was the COSHH Regulations, shaping the management of hazardous substances at work. In many ways, Paul’s approach was to ask the same difficult question that those of us who had been working on generic assessments had been trying to tackle: Given that there aren’t many occupational hygienists, and there’s no prospect of measuring every worker exposure to every hazardous substance, is there a way of generalising what we do know to apply to many more workplaces and so protect many more workers?
“The answer for Paul was control banding, putting potential exposures into well-defined categories and establishing controls appropriate for each band, so that those who created the risks were genuinely empowered to control and protect. This has had a major global impact, helped by Paul’s leadership of the International Occupational Hygiene Association (IOHA) as president, as well as a similar position for the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS).
“Above all, his work has demonstrated the benefits of technical people, scientists and others, having a powerful voice in the forums of power, able to influence workplace standards based on good evidence of what causes harm and what protects. By being open, publishing HSE research for the first time, holding the information and analysis up to debate and challenge, Paul also established trust in the arrangements. Even governments bent towards radical cuts in public expenditure cannot ignore the information from the Labour Force Survey, which he developed to address health as well as accident data.
“The IOSH Lifetime Award has gone to someone who more than fulfils the criteria of making a real difference in real workplaces, making them healthier to work not just in the UK but worldwide. It was never a strategy focused on minimum legal compliance but always in pursuit of excellence, empowering workers and their employers to take and exercise control and reduce the terrible toll wreaked on health by unmanaged workplaces. Paul Oldershaw is another luminary in the pantheon of IOSH Lifetime Achievement Award winners.”
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
A well deserved winner of the lifetime award. In fact probably the most deserved winner of all time.
I worked in HSE when Paul.was Head of Profession….at one.stage my wife was diagnosed with a thyroid tumour when our children were still quite young and he told me to take off as much time.as i needed..i have never forgotten his act of kindness even though he may not even remember it. Despite a gruff exterior at times deep down Paul is a decent man. Well deserved award.