About Us
Our Founder – Catherine Lee
An experienced Occupational Health and Safety Management Consultant with more than 30 years’ experience across a range of industries, Catherine has established a strong reputation for safety leadership. She partners with management teams to support and guide them in achieving their strategic OHS objectives.
Most recently Catherine developed the Neurodiverse Safe Work (NDSW) Initiative when she recognised that neurodivergent workers are often vulnerable and at increased risk of work-related injury and illness if the employer’s health and safety management systems are designed around neurotypical functioning.
Catherine is a Certified OHS Professional (Australian Institute of Health and Safety), a full member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, the Institute of Management Consultants and the International Coaching Federation. She is accredited by the Queensland Government as a Workers’ Compensation Self-Insurance Auditor (Office of Industrial Relations) and is a Licenced Private Investigator.
Catherine has achieved outstanding results in supporting employers to:
- Make tangible improvements to their workplace culture by focusing on worker engagement, consultation, and negotiation.
- Implement systems for the early identification and management of risks to the health and safety of workers; and
- Reduce workers’ compensation costs through injury prevention and management programs, proactive and complex case management, and self-insurance.
Catherine is a popular speaker for webinars, podcasts and conferences on the topic of neurodiversity at work, particularly in relation to health and safety.
The NDSW Story
The Neurodiverse Safe Work Initiative™ grew from a unique service that was developed by Lethbridge Piper & Associates, an Occupational Health and Safety Management Consultancy that has served Australian employers since 2014.
In 2020, Catherine was asked to investigate a workplace incident in which Kyle, a young and otherwise healthy manufacturing worker had fallen and sustained a fractured coccyx. You can read more about Kyle’s story here.
What unfolded during that investigation led Catherine to identify a gap in the way that safety is traditionally managed by employers that exposes a significant minority of the workforce to greater physical and psychological risks than neurotypical workers, simply because they think and function differently.
This realisation ultimately changed Catherine’s whole approach to the way she serves her clients in relation to occupational health and safety.
It also changed her life. Her studies in neurodiversity in adults, led to her own diagnosis of ADHD.
“That moment was earth-shattering. It changed everything for me both personally and professionally. Suddenly my whole life made sense and I understood why I had struggled so much with things that other people managed easily. Professionally it made me look at the way employers manage the health and safety of workers through a completely different lens”.
