Planning your Businesses Health & Safety
13 August 2018
To implement your health and safety policy, you need to establish and maintain an effective health and safety management system that is proportionate to the risks.
You should set the direction for effective health and safety management, and a policy that sets a clear direction will help to ensure communication of health and safety duties and benefits throughout the organisation.
1 - Policy
Policies should be designed to meet legal requirements, prevent health and safety problems, and enable you to respond quickly where difficulties arise or new risks are introduced.
You need to think about what you are going to do to manage health and safety, then decide who is going to do what and how. This is your health and safety policy. If your organisation has five or more employees, that policy must be written down.
Your policy sets a clear direction for the organisation to follow and should be shared throughout the workforce, so that everyone understands how health and safety will be managed.
It needs to reflect the organisation’s:
- values and beliefs
- commitment to provide a safe and healthy environment
Your actions, and those of your workers, mirror the statements you have made.
2 - Planning
Planning is essential for the implementation of health and safety policies. Adequate control of risk can only be achieved through co-ordinated action by all members of the organisation.
An effective system for health and safety management requires organisations to plan to:
- control risks;
- react to changing demands;
- sustain positive health and safety attitudes and behaviours.
Effective planning is concerned with prevention through identifying and controlling risks. This is especially important when dealing with health risks that may only become apparent after a long period of time. In addition to setting your policy, planning should include steps to ensure legal compliance and procedures for dealing with emergency situations. It should involve people throughout the organisation.
Planning the system you will use to manage health and safety involves:
- designing, developing and implementing suitable and proportionate management arrangements, risk control systems and workplace precautions;
- operating and maintaining the system while also seeking improvement where needed;
- linking it to how you manage other aspects of the organisation.
- In order to plan successfully, you need to establish:
- where the organisation is now, by considering accurate information about the current situation;
- where you need to be, using legal requirements and benchmarking to make comparisons;
- what action is necessary to reach that point.
4 Steps to continuously improving Health & Safety in your business
- Planning your Businesses Health & Safety
- Doing, designing safe practices into different job roles and business functions
- Checking, active and reactive monitoring
- Acting, lessons learned, feedback and continuously improving your Health & Safety Policy
Why people choose RISK for their Health & Safety training providers
RISK trainers are active Health & Safety consultants, this means they fully understand what it’s like to work in a manufacturing or construction environment. They have experienced the issues and challenges you face in your business and can help you develop robust implementation processes as well as provide the knowledge to pass the relevant qualification for your job role.
The information contained within this article is sourced from HSE Book, Managing for Health and Safety (HSG65) which can be downloaded here.
This information is relevant to NEBOSH courses and the CITB SMSTS and SSSTS courses
