Health and safety is paramount at the New Dunedin Hospital site, and together everyone involved does everything they can to ensure a healthy and safe workplace for all. For us, this isn’t about compliance, it’s about consistent best practice. No-one should be harmed at work and injury prevention is our top priority.

Unfortunately, health and safety practices in the construction industry haven’t always been consistent.  The New Dunedin Hospital site was visited today by Rhett Brown, a workplace accident survivor, professional speaker and book author.  20 years ago, Rhett was seriously hurt as a builder on a construction site and has suffered the consequences of poor health and safety practices. His journey of the subsequent near suicide, divorce, and rehabilitation that followed was sobering for all. Any one of these would stretch any person to the limit, but he had them all to deal with.

Until 2004, Rhett was a walking person, married with children, working (including 20 years as a police officer), and living a busy life like many of us until his life changed in a matter of seconds.

An innocuous 2.2 metre fall from a domestic dwelling construction site left Rhett with a seriously broken neck and paralysed from the level of his armpits to his toes - 84% of his body, including most of his arms and hands. There followed hospitalisation with major reconstruction surgery followed by six months at the Otara spinal unit, then discharge to a private hospital for the elderly in Whangarei where he lived for 2 ½ years. His 31-year marriage ended six weeks after his fall and despite all this he has rebuilt his life from the ground up – including designing, planning and supervising the build of his own house, finally moving into that in June 2007 where he now lives with 24/7 care givers.

Finding the courage to thrive and survive, Rhett has travelled all over New Zealand as a professional speaker talking to corporate and industry groups about the consequences of a serious workplace accident. 

"My current job title is ‘life saver’.  My simple presence is a stark reminder that we are not bulletproof,” says Rhett.

Our grateful thanks to Rhett for sharing his story and the sheer guts, determination and inner strength it took to find life, light and purpose again. Our thanks also to Southbase Construction, the lead contractor for the Outpatient Building, for hosting Rhett’s visit to site.

Rhett’s book, in itself no easy feat to write because he could only use his right thumb to type the manuscript, is available as Kindle edition on Amazon here This Way Up – Where would I be without a good set of wheels?

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