The webinar was organized by the Safety Specialist Committee (SSC) at the HKIE Headquarter on 19 January 2022. The webinar was very successful with 545 registrants for a limit of 500 and the turned out was about 396 members joining the webinar.

The speaker, Mr. Andy LO is the Founder Chairman of Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), Hong Kong Branch and the Vice President of IOSH from 2009 to 2015. Andy has accumulated many years’ industries experience during his pro-longed years of service in a mass transportation company. Afer working in substantial construction safety projects for so many years, which including tunneling construction, bridges and viaducts construction, railway stations and depot construction, track works and rolling stocks, E&M installation and other heavy ventilation plant buildings. He found "Foster a good safety culture" issue is the most important subjects to improve industrial safety standard.

Nowadays, Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) is still misunderstood as a profession that follows a paper-driven approach, with much emphasis on operational control and process compliance. And many industries participate feels this approach has failed in reducing the fatality rate in recent years.

In this webinar, Andy shared the most common reasons that why “Foster a Safety Culture” initiative has emerged with a focus on improving the OSH practices in the general culture of an organization. The webinar introduced many ways in enhancing safety culture in an organization through leadership; two ways communications; staff engagement and accountability; training and learning culture; and good OSH behavior. And the presentation also supplemented with a lot of good and bad practice photographs taken among many other countries all over the world to demonstrate different safety culture in different regions. 

Finally, Andy concluded how to foster our safety culture through a better coordination, cooperation and collaboration among Clients, Consultants, Contractors and the Safety Practitioners in our engineering profession.

On behalf of the SSC, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to Andy for their valuable contribution and sharing of experience in safety culture studies for the HKIE members. Mr. Andy Lo not only gave a very attractive presentation to the audience with many practical examples but also shared his insights to enhance the safety culture in the industry.