About Us

Soteris Pty Ltd is the culmination of personal and professional collaborations between four highly skilled and experienced consultants across the fields of psychology, risk and safety sciences, ergonomics, and engineering. Each member of Soteris shares a passion for helping organisations to promote safety and wellbeing through assisting individuals and organisations to eliminate fatalities and serious physical and psychological injuries. Through this, our goal is to improve the overall quality of life for employees and maximising potential for organisations.

We all came to understand that whatever many organisations are doing to manage the risks of fatalities and serious injuries, it just isn’t always working for them. We have observed how organisations see their injury statistics improving only to reach a plateau that they could not get past. Considering all our experiences we agreed that we knew what always has helped – a positive safety culture. We have identified and understood the power of our collective knowledge and experience in helping organisations achieve a strong positive safety culture – one of the best synergies available.

OUR VALUES

Double Positive Safety

We believe strongly in adopting a double positive approach to safety at work and at home. In practice this means focusing on achieving presence of wellbeing rather than the traditional double negative – absence of harm. Everything that improves the positivity of the safety culture is rewarded. Our emphasis is on reinforcing the beliefs and attitudes to want to make safety a positive choice rather than a compliance exercise.

Collaboration and Relationships

We believe that strong relationships and collaboration are at the heart of success. We believe in the importance of working together to share knowledge, experience and expertise. We welcome the diverse experiences that developing relationships with different people bring to individuals and organisations as a whole.

Leadership

We believe that strong leadership is at the heart of strong individuals and organisations. We believe in being strong leaders in safety and commit to modelling effective safety behaviours at all times.

Return on Investment

We want our clients to experience tangible positive changes in their workforce and workplace by choosing to work with us.

Innovation

We believe in the importance of seeking new and effective ways of being safe. We observe trends in our respective disciplines, we keep up with contemporary research, and we offer a unique combination of programs designed to maximise client outcomes.

Scientific Foundation

We believe that our work with clients must be evidence-based and drawn from reliable and robust research and practices in the relevant sciences.

Integrity in Action

We believe in transparency, honesty and integrity in all that we do. We pride ourselves on ethical and confidential practice. As well as offering an exceptional quality of work we also attend to fundamentals like doing what we say we will, being reliable, and keeping in regular contact to provide any support requested. We deliver what we say we will deliver.

Respect

We want each and every client, and their people, to feel respected. We respect the intellectual property, resources, and time of our clients and act in the best interests of our clients at all times.

THE SOTERIS MANAGEMENT TEAM

founder01Dr Leonie Horrigan

PhD, BBehSc (Hons), MAPS

Leonie is a behavioural scientist and registered psychologist who completed a PhD on change management, resolving paradoxes, and complexity theory. She has had experience working in senior executive positions and extensive work in organisational psychology. She is passionate about assisting organisations to achieve sustainable change and through her years of experience has perfected the process of review processes using interview and story-telling methods to avoid future safety incidents. She is a senior executive coach, and a skilled trainer and facilitator. She attributes her passion for safety to observing her father work tirelessly in his pursuit to assist organisations and individuals achieve positive safety cultures.

founder02Jim Whiting

MSc, Dip Ed (Qld), MSc (Surrey), MACPSM, MIEAust, CPEng

Jim is a biomedical engineer/physicist specialising in safety and risk sciences, with wide experience in almost every industry over 30 years. His activities have been in diverse applications such as preparation of safety risk cases for unmanned drones and fatality risk analyses for large corporations. Jim is someone who has been in senior executive management himself, who loves engaging everyone he leads, advises and trains. He is someone who has undertaken so many incident investigations that he knows not only what and why things go wrong, but also importantly what are the best options for making things go right. Jim is passionate about his safety consultancy and training work, so that ultimately it must have a positive effect on the care and wellbeing of all involved.

founder02Ken Horrigan

MEng (Mech), CPE, FESA, CPEng

Ken is a highly experienced Ergonomist. He also admits to being Leonie’s father; the person who inspired her passion for health, safety and wellbeing. He attributes his own fervour for safety to his mother’s passion for looking after everyone in her small country town. This ultimately led him to apply his talents to finding ways to help organisations become more productive and more efficient by looking after their people. Ken holds a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering and discovered the secret behind combining productivity and safety was human engineering – ergonomics and human factors. After studying and applying ergonomics and human cognition extensively, Ken became a Certified Professional Ergonomist (CPE) – an engineering ergonomist. He has since been applying his skills and knowledge across many industries within Australia and overseas for many years. He was recently recertified as a Chartered Engineer and as a CPE across all three ergonomic domains (Physical, Cognitive and Organisational) and is now a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia. Ken is also a skilled trainer and facilitator and has lectured extensively on all three domains of ergonomics.