Health & Safety Management - The Daily Reality, And Why Most Schemes Fail

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Health & safety management can seem like a stressful and challenging task for those responsible for overseeing its effective implementation across the business. Yet all too often it can be easy to overlook the fact that implementing a health & safety management scheme is really down to the individual employees and workers.

Choosing an appropriate scheme and ensuring that proper and adequate training is provided to those responsible for its every day implementation is only the first step. For a health & safety management system to be effective it has to be workable, and that means within the confines and limitations of a busy work schedule and within a working environment.

One of the problems that many companies have found is that rolling out a new safety management scheme might seem a good move on the surface, but at a practical level it may be only one of a number of different safety management schemes in operation across the company. With several different equipment safety schemes it can be hard for workers to constantly switch between routines, systems, expectations and protocols.

Whilst a worker may be happy with the safety protocol governing the use of ladders, there may be quite a different scheme in place for vehicular machinery such as fork lift trucks. Then he moves on to use cutting equipment or welding equipment, and finds a third completely different scheme in operation. From one aspect of the workplace to the next workers are constantly having to switch between schemes, and this is where the problems inevitably creep in.

The first problem with having a variety of health & safety management systems in place that may be difficult to comprehend or time-consuming to put into practise is that workers will make mistakes. They may be quite happy following through a checklist of safety points before using a ladder, but then fail to remember certain aspects of safety when operating machinery.

The second problem is that workers become fed up with having to keep switching from one safety scheme to another, or become tired of the time it takes to keep filling in paperwork or complete a variety of safety requirements. In such cases shortcuts creep in, and safety cheques are missed out entirely.

If the safety scheme has not been designed thoroughly then fraudulent entries which suggest safety cheques have been carried out when they have not lead to the eventual result that someone is injured or an accident occurs which could have been avoided had equipment been checked properly first, or the safety cheque carried out properly.

What is needed, therefore, is not for management to introduce new safety cheques and requirements to patch over perceived problems, but to consider a holistic approach which employs a single health & safety management scheme across the entire workplace. With a single scheme in place workers no longer have to remember half a dozen different sets of regulations or protocols, and instead simply follow one routine which is clear, easy to use and easy to understand.

Additionally, for any safety management scheme to work it has to be practical. This means that workers should be able to carry out cheques quickly, conveniently and without unnecessary paperwork required.

But whilst it may seem a good idea to ease the burden on workers whilst increasing the level of safety in the workplace, it must be remembered that health & safety management systems also have to meet with two further requirements.

The first requirement is that the system must be tamper proof, preventing workers from bypassing, overlooking or fooling the safety system in place. By providing a secure and tamper proof safety management system workers are unable to overlook or bypass the safety cheques required, protecting the company from unfair claims should an employee deliberately tamper with or bypass the stipulated safety requirements.

The second requirement is that the company should be able to easily pick up an audit trail demonstrating the use of and status of safety cheques carried out on all equipment in the workplace. In some cases this has meant additional paperwork and forms to be filled in by workers. With an effective health & safety management scheme it should be the case that the safety cheques being carried out include enough information to provide a valid and useful audit trail for management, without adding unnecessarily to the amount of paperwork needed to be completed by the workers.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Finding a comprehensive health & safety management system which is easy to use, consistent across the whole workplace and tamper proof is not easy. But the Good To Go Safe Equipment Management System available from Intersafety provides an ideal solution, helping companies meet the strict health & safety regulations whilst allowing workers to spend more

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