Occupational Safety and Health Management Systems and Their Compliance among Petrol Stations in Kenya: A Case Study in Nakuru County

Abstract

Companies have a legal and social responsibility to ensure the safety of its workers, all persons lawfully present at the workplace and the surrounding community. This requires laid down procedures and routing process which aims at identifying, eliminating, minimizing and control the work-related hazards and decrease the risks. To be effective, the Occupational Safety and Health Management Systems (OSHMS) need to be integrated within the organization’s safety policy and objectives. Therefore, this explains why OSHMS has continued to play a pivotal role in the decision making process in most companies. This study aimed at assessing occupational health and safety management systems in place and their compliance. The sampling unit was petrol stations and the study employed use descriptive study design. The purposive sampling was employed to select thirty two (32) petrol stations in Njoro Molo and Nakuru Municipalities of Nakuru County with a special focus on petrol stations which have dispenser pumps, car servicing bay and Front Office section. Data was collected using purposive sampling, stratified and simple random where interviews, observations and questionnaire survey. Descriptive statistics which involved frequency tables and percentages was used to analyze the data. The findings of this study shows that more than half of the petrol stations lacked defined Occupational Safety and Management systems. There is need of Occupational Safety and Health Management System to be integrated within petrol stations policy in order to reduce the operations mistakes, costs of reducing problems and level of risks while ensuring that they comply with laws and regulations.

Exploring Occupational Health and Safety Practices Implemented in Filling Stations, Maseru, Lesotho

“…Working hours showed 64% of the respondents worked for 8-10 hours per day, 23% for 6-8 hours, and 13% worked for 10 hours during their shifts. The findings are in line with those of the study conducted by Mutungi et al (2019), which found that 86.7% of employees worked between 8-10 hours with some 5.6% working for more than 10 hours. Working for more than 8 hours could lead to accidents in the workplace, especially because workers are fatigued and concentration levels are low.…”

“…Concerning routine work practices, 97.2% of employees agreed to utilizing personal protective equipment (PPE) while performing their tasks. Only 60.0% and 71.4% of the respondents used PPE in the studies conducted by Mutungi et al (2019) and Okafoagu et al (2017) respectively. The majority of the respondents (72.2%) were able to use fire extinguishers and even in the study conducted by Kakwi (2020), results indicated many (99.1%) participants were able to use fire extinguishers.…”

“…Table Moreover, medical fitness certificate was requested from around 59% of the participants upon their employment while the majority of the respondents (81.1%) in the study conducted in Kenya did not undertake medical fitness test before employment (Mutungi et al, 2019).…”

“…Control practices may include effective use of different PPE and a study in Kenya concluded that only 6.7% of workers reported the use of PPE with the most commonly used being an apron or overall and the least being gloves and face masks. Though the majority of respondents had stated that PPE was provided by the employer, the low usage was because their availability was only 'on need basis' during offloading which was considered to be hazardous while some studies show that there is a lower utilization of PPE among workers due to it being uncomfortable (Mutungi, 2019).…”

“…Every employer in Maseru petrol stations must regulate the working hours of each employee as per the provisions of any Act governing occupational health and safety as it is usually ignored by employers. According to Mutungi (2019), negative incidents that occurred at the filling stations were attributed to a worker being exhausted or overwhelmed by work due to working for long hours (averagely 10 hours). When workers work for long unregulated hours, this could result in physiological risk factors whereby there are repetitive movements of the same kind that are harmful to their health.…”