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This is Roger ...
He works for Complete Fitness in their legal department. His responsibilities include maintaining the business registration and licencing obligations, managing contracts and insurance, workplace health and safety and risk management, and compliance with legislation and industry regulations.
What are the main areas of concern that a fitness centre has from a legal perspective?
The safety of our clients and employees is probably the most important aspect, fitness activities do have a fairly high risk of injuries and other health-related conditions that must be taken into consideration and hopefully mitigated. Achieving a safe work environment is definitely possible but everyone needs to cooperate and follow the designated laws, regulations, policies and procedures.
The other main area is in relation to client contracts. These documents can be complex and we are always conscious that they must abide by consumer law protections. We work with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) and other similar government departments and agencies to ensure our contracts are compliant.
How do you investigate for non-compliances and what are the outcomes?
We run various internal audits throughout the year. Such as safety and risk management, financial, personnel records, contract compliance, and customer service. If we discover any discrepancies or unethical behaviour we take action to amend the situation. This may mean re-doing a process, implementing a new policy, getting advice from an external consultant or agency, conducting training, or in extreme situations performance management and/or termination.
We are also subject to external audits from time-to-time, like food safety inspectors who come to check our on-site cafe and representatives from the State Government Workplace Health and Safety department.
Have you ever needed to seek external legal advice?
Yes, on occasion. The fitness centre has been in operation for more than ten years and during that time there have been incidents. Two, in particular, come to mind. They involved fairly serious injuries sustained during separate fitness activities. One of them was simply a freak accident and after an investigation, it was shown there was nothing more we could have done to prevent it. However, there was another incident, luckily not life-threatening, that was our fault and we did get sued for it. We engaged the services of an independent legal firm for both of those situations.