VICTORIA – A staple of Canadian worksites for decades is the presence of a trained and certified first aid attendant. Now a pair of enhanced health and safety designations promoted by the BC Construction Safety Alliance (BCCSA) could see the attendance of construction safety officers ideally become just as ubiquitous.
The National Construction Safety Officer (NCSO™) and the National Health and Safety Administrator (NHSA) designations are expansions of earlier programs designed to provide construction companies with a valuable resource to aid with the implementation and administration of their health and safety programs.
“To achieve this designation recipients have to show proof of continued work in the industry, not merely the amount of training that they’ve taken. So I’d have to say that it is the most hands on designation for construction safety that can be attained in the industry,” explained Ammar Kavazovic, BCCSA’s NCSO™ Coordinator.
Samuel Livingstone was recently certified as a National Construction Safety Officer through the NCSO™ program, and will be putting his upgraded skills to work as the Health & Safety Advisor with Kenaidan Contracting Ltd. For Livingstone the training provided by the program will make his company a safer place to work.
“The newly rebuilt NCSO™ designation is unique as it is a focused offering that is designed for people with existing construction skills, to build a company’s safety program and ensure ongoing continual improvement,” he said.
“The NCSO™, as a national designation, is one that is recognized as demonstrating a level of competency. It is important to recognize that the NCSO™ of today is different from what it was a couple of years ago. Prior, the bar was set very low to get an NCSO™ designation, and those who held it did not have to do anything to maintain it.”
The BCCSA is a not-for-profit association created to provide services to over 40,000 construction companies in the province, firms with a combined workforce of more than 180,000. The Association is funded by the construction sector, plus select aggregate and ready-mixed industry operators who pay the group through a portion of their WorkSafeBC annual assessments.
