What is health and safety

What is health and safety

Not wanting to point out the obvious, but one question which has been asked of me on a few occasions is, what is health and safety?. Most of you reading this probably have a very good idea of what health and safety is, being that the subject has had a lot of publicity in the press and you will probably have come into contact with it at work. A lot of the press and interaction you may have had with the subject might have been seen in a bad light, the press often publish stories whereby health and safety is blamed for stopping things, such as stopping children form playing conkers at school. Well I would like to achieve two things with this post, firstly I would like to explain what health and safety is and secondly I hope to show how, if applied properly, health and safety can help in your working life, without stopping things from happening.

So what is health and safety. Frankly in my opinion it is common sense, we all apply it in every day life, you don’t cross a road without checking that there are no hazards such as moving cars, if there were cars coming then you wouldn’t cross the road if there was a strong likelihood of the cars colliding with you (ie if the risk is high). You would probably base this decision on how far away the cars are, how fast they are going and how far you have to go to get to safety.

At the workplace the health and safety executive (HSE) enforce what is known as the health and safety at work act 1974. This act has a number of sections which place a duty on both the employer and employee. From an employers point of view, your required to ensure so far as is reasonably practicable the health, safety and welfare of your employees. The question asked by most employers is how do I do this? To achieve this a range of supporting regulations have been written to help you, if you follow these then you will achieve the aim of ensuring your staff’s safety. Examples of health and safety regulations include:

- Management of health and safety
- First aid at work regulations
- Work at height regulations
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) regulations

Basically if you can think of a subject at work there is likely to be a regulation somewhere which will tell you how to do it safely and these can be found on the HSE website.

So how do we apply common sense to health and safety? Well good practice is to apply the 5 simple steps of risk assessment (which will be explored in a further blog). In applying these steps take a common sense approach, consider if someone can be harmed by what your doing and if they can then do something to make it safe. To me that is simple and common sense, something which you would be doing anyway, only we are giving it the name of “risk assessment”. It is not about stopping what your doing, it’s about making it safe, remember you can’t remove all the risks in everything you do, there will

always be some risk but its about controlling that risk and reducing it as far as is reasonably practicable. So you can get on with doing what your good at, only with the knowledge that you have done everything reasonably practicable to ensure safety of anyone who can be affected.