With a direct workforce of over 15,000 across four large and diverse sectors, our projects often benefit from the experience brought into the team by new members transferring from another part of the business. 

This was the case when SHEQ Manager Grant McCleery moved into his current role on our Defence & Social Infrastructure sector after working in the Transport sector for four years. 

Grant says when he joined the health business in March last year, he was able to apply expertise in areas like traffic management and rope access to these two contracts based in Sydney's northern suburbs. 

The Royal North Shore Hospital contract is one of the largest and most complex healthcare Public Private Partnerships undertaken in New South Wales. We commenced operations of our 28-year contract in October 2008 as part of the InfraShore consortium, providing core facilities, engineering and maintenance services to over 217,000m² of hospital space. 

A few suburbs away, across the 9-storey, 488 bed facility, our services for the Northern Beaches Hospital include asset and utilities maintenance, gardening and landscape management. 

^{Pictured above: Altus Traffic control used for installation of additional road calming speed bumps within RNSH Campus.}

Grant's experience with traffic control has been applied in the car park at Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH), where our contractors are regularly working to replace lighting - particularly during the recent project whereby all the high wattage lights in the car park were swapped out for energy efficient LEDs. 

"People often don't think of carparks as live traffic areas, but it can be just as dangerous for workers there as it is working on the side of a motorway," Grant says.

Implementing robust traffic control measures in the car parks during works has been an important additional safety measure.

Also at RNSH, teams required to repair or maintain external infrastructure on buildings that are up to 12 storeys high. In recent extreme weather events, several large panels on the corner of a building became loose and required prompt repairs. Whilst there were already controls in place for working at heights, Grant was able to introduce additional safety controls utilising rope access work. 

"Rope work enables the contractor crews to access hard to reach parts of the buildings, for example the panels attached to the side of buildings where there isn't a large gap between two buildings," Grant explains.

We use rope work in the Transport sector when we're working on slopes, so the application of that expertise was something I was able to facilitate.

Grant says he's had good feedback from the teams at each site following the implementation of these additional control measures. 

"It's been a great experience working with the teams and contractors to implement these new processes and the safety controls and processes that support them," Grant says. 

Find out more about the work we do in the Health sector here.