Officer Development Programme: Health and Safety Governance in the Public Service - Course 14

The Government Health and Safety Lead (GHSL) has partnered with the Institute of Directors (IoD) to offer the Officer Development Programme, designed for public service agency senior leaders with officer responsibilities under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA).  

Programme outline

This professional development programme includes 9 hours of online and in-person workshops (a customised IoD Advanced Health and Safety course, delivered across four short sessions), supplemented by pre-and post-course e-learning modules, reading materials, resources, tools, and case studies.   

All course and resource content has been tailored for the public service, recognising that officers in most central departments and agencies are also senior leaders with management responsibilities for health and safety. 

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Programme schedule

Workshop 1:
Session 1 - Managing, leading and governing health and safety
Session  2  - H&S risk management
14 August 2025
8:30am-1.00pm
Wellington

Workshop 2:
Session 1 - Overlapping duties
Session 2 - Monitoring what matters
18 September 2025
8:30am-1:00pm
Wellington

Workshop overview

Content from the IoD Directors’ Advanced Health and Safety course has been tailored to meet the specific needs of the public service. 

The following topics are covered across four, two-hour sessions.  Each topic will be explored with a governance focus but with consideration as to how the topic may be viewed through different lenses (governance, leadership, management) in a public sector environment:  

• Managing, leading and governing Health & Safety – an overview of the three roles and perspectives. Includes leadership behaviours and practices. Recap on the scope of PCBU duties. Bringing it to life –practical application, ie meeting structures, reporting, questions that should be asked, using the three lenses of governance, leadership and management.
• Health and safety risk management. Risk landscape (acute, chronic and catastrophic), risk assessment methodologies, implementing effective prevention and mitigation controls, controls assurance (3 Lines of Defence), risk tolerance, owning your risk matrix, alignment with Enterprise Risk Management.
• Governing overlapping duties and understanding the complexity and challenges of identifying and managing them (particularly thinking about the public sector’s wider role in policy setting, standard setting, system ownership/funding).
• Monitoring what matters – setting meaningful KPIs, metrics, insights, reporting and information management systems to effectively seek assurances. Building connections and GHSL support.

The Government Health and Safety Lead (GHSL) team are here to support you throughout the programme. To get the most out of it, we also encourage you to use the  time between each workshop to apply your learning and to engage and connect with your peers and other course participants.  Please download the following document before undertaking the programme to further understand how you can apply your learnings, build connections and access GHSL support.

Building connections and GHSL support guide