Safety and Health Practices in Malaysia

Safety and health practices in Malaysia

1. Introduction on safety and health

Safety and health is the great challenge not only for the individual who works in any working sectors, but to the companies and the government as well. Each year, government has been striving to reduce the number of accidents occur at the workplace, and that effort is enhance by the establishment of numerous safety and health related institution in Malaysia. There are two (2) organisations that operate under the ministry of human resource; National Institute of Safety and Health (NIOSH) and Department of Safety and Health (DOSH). Both carry the shared objective; to help the government and companies that are operating in Malaysia to reduce the numbers of injuries and fatalities that occur in the workplace; which involve workers mainly.

One of the main reasons why government, in this current day put much effort towards the implementation of good Occupational Safety and Health regulation is due to the fact that our country has suffered from great loss in terms of paying out a large number of compensation to the victims of workplace accidents. However, there is another issues that increase the concern of the government, which, the fact now has stated that a large amount of compensation has been paid out to those who involved in commuting accidents – a new trend of accident that are related to work. Due to the fact that this rising trend is disturbing, government has been acting together with Malaysian Institue of Road Safety Research (MNIROS) to try to reduce the number of Commuting accidents to work every year. According to the statistics gathered by MIROS, in Malaysia 6877 deaths are due to road crashes in 2011, which resulting to RM8.3 billion of loss to the economy. On average, there are 19 deaths occur every day.

To strengthen the fact that commuting accidents is the main contributor to the rising percentage of work-related injury and fatality, a report produced by SOCSO has indicated that from 2001 until 2012, the percentage increased from 21.84% to 42.28%, which that indicates that it rose up to more than 20%. Motorcyclists are the most affected as the percentage is at 84.3% compared to other road users. The fact also is very convincing since every day Malaysian could see a number of accidents involving motorcyclist being reported and it happens almost every day. In terms of gender, males are the majority that involved in traffic accidents with the percentage of 83%. Based on the findings published by MIROS, most of the accidents occurred at the peak hour which at the early morning between 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. shockingly, if the type of crash being taken into account, 51.5% of it was single vehicle accidents and only 48.5 involved multiple vehicle accidents. In terms of factors that contribute to single vehicle accidents, the most contributing factor is the victim was panic and could not control the vehicle, followed by the loss control of vehicle then followed by fatigueness or being sleepy.