Health and Safety Management: Changes from October 2013
Throughout October there were several changes in the legislation on safety and health. How to be safe and how to manage the safety of workers? RIDDOR (Injury, Illness, and Hazardous Occurrence Reporting Regulations), First Aid Regulations, Youth at Work Regulations, are just some of the recent changes among the many details that authorities were trying to adjust or remove. Since the Lofsted review, the government has worked to make things easier for all of us…
Fewer security requirements don’t necessarily make things easier, at least not for everyone. In general, there are many positive changes; however, some of them are not as clear and simple as they were intended to be. Depending on the type of service provided and the size of your business, these new changes may affect you in some way. The truth of this new approach that the authorities are promoting is that everything is simplified and made easier, but the penalties and fines are even greater for those who make mistakes. It is all an attempt to be blunt and direct for you to comply, however if you do not have a full and clear understanding you should seek professional advice and guidance.
So regardless of what bondholders do or don’t do, every health and safety failure translates into more spending. The change in attitude towards health and safety is the essential change that will hopefully be seen in the coming years. More than anything, the idea is to begin to perceive health and safety as an integral part of good management in general. Instead of seeing it as a separate, “unnecessary” and “expensive” system of rules, what is the fairly common view among many companies?
A revised version of the Guide to Successful Health and Safety Management (HSG65) will be published in the coming months; updated guidance will be available online on the HSE website. In general it represents the aforementioned change in attitude towards health and safety. The simplified recommendation on how to keep workers safe moves from the use of POPMAR (Policy, Organization, Planning, Performance Measurement, Audit and Review) to the much clearer slogan “Plan, Do, Check, Act”.
This is quite a useful way to think about and organize your office, factory or construction site… Maybe some people could apply it in their personal life as well? It represents a breaking point in the perception of the “dreaded” health and safety compliance. Over the years, different experiences and talks with colleagues have taught us that business owners and managers who effectively use health and safety as a management tool are the most successful. It can be tricky to get started, but once you have a well-organized business, the ball starts rolling and the benefits are not long in coming.
Plan where you want to be, identify any problems, and make a clear list of simple steps and people who will be responsible for corrective action. Make sure that the basic legal documents required for security compliance (health and safety policy, risk assessments, etc.) are well written and well understood by everyone affected by them. Once you have a workforce that is aware of the fact that they need to work as safely as possible, everything tends to be easier. This is the stage where you must decide how to monitor performance, based on active indicators such as health surveillance, routine inspections, and reactive methods, for example monitoring sickness absences and investigating accidents and incidents.
Do, now it’s all about risk assessment, it’s about doing the necessary assessments and managing them, always start with the biggest risks/hazards. Everyone from the top to the bottom of the organization needs to be clear on what they need to do. Invest in things like training, competent professional advice, introduction of new equipment, and make sure you have the correct and reliable supervision.
Check, when it comes to monitoring the health and safety and/or organization of your production line, there is nothing better than implementing on-site controls and audits. Don’t just rely on what the documentation says, go and see for yourself and talk to your workers and line managers.
Take action, learn from mistakes and compare your results with those of other companies, even the competition. Take accident and incident information into account, sickness absences and near misses will tell you where the fault lines are.
