Occupational Health and Safety

The Occupational Health and Safety department (OHS) is responsible for oversight and management of safety hazards impacting staff safety. This department ensures that the legislative safety requirements for staff, both under federal and provincial legislation, are implemented within the Nations workplace(s) to protect staff from physical, biological, chemical, ergonomic, psychosocial, and general safety hazards. This includes policy and procedure development and implementation, ongoing inspections of various workplaces and equipment, incident investigation, facilitation of the Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee, and working with directors, managers, supervisors, and Leadership to ensure all staff are safe while performing their work duties.

SFN has two dedicated OHS staff, who are part of the OHS & Emergency Management Department.

The Emergency Preparedness staff of SFN includes the OHS & Emergency Programming Manager and the nation’s Cultural Burning & FireSmart Coordinator. These staff work to ensure that the Nation is prepared for a range of emergency scenarios which may impact the nation – wildfire, flood events, extreme temperatures, and critical infrastructure failures. This work scope includes community engagement, formal emergency preparedness and response plans, training of staff, working in partnership with surrounding jurisdictions who manage events on the traditional territory of the Nation, and mitigating potential threats.

As part of the mitigation efforts, the Nation facilitates the FireSmart BC Wildfire Mitigation program which includes home and critical infrastructure assessments to prevent spread of fire into community during wildfire events. If your curious about how wildfire impacts homes, or how the assessments take place – please reach out! Or for more information, check out the ‘Emergency Info’ page on our website.

Our Cultural Burning Coordinator is assisting the Nation in revitalizing the cultural burning practices of Saulteau. While burning can help to reduce the intensity and spread of wildfires, we know there are many other benefits and purposes to applying fire to the landscape. For more information, please get in touch!