Health and Safety Business Essay

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Co-operate: When supervisors are appointed within the organization a culture of trust and respect between employees and management can evolve. As this culture increases in strength so will the ability to share ideas and solutions between each party. To help employees share ideas and solutions a greater sense of communication is needed, this can be achieved through meetings between employees and management, a suggestion box where employees can present their view anonymously or a simple notice board to keep both employees and management up to date with any changes that may be made in the working environment. It should also be remember to engage employees from different departments together and not just employees to top management, the more communication between everybody involved in the organisation the better the results will be. It is vital to know how employees wish to receive information from management, formal meetings or brief hand out sheets with the information may be most effective but management needs to ask employees first before giving information out in a manner that may not suit them. When giving information to employees it is important to remember to use simple language and not over complicate the facts you want your employees to know. After giving employees information in the form they wish to receive it they should be given the opportunity to ask any questions about it and not have to wait for a prolonged period of time before being able to do so.

Communication: For there to be effective health and safety practice within an organisation communication is key. There should be a flow of information from the top manager to bottom employees and vice versa and between employees in the same departments and other departments within the organisation. It is important to remember communication does not just end with employees and management within the organisation, anybody who is entering the premise should be informed about any health and safety actions they need to take while being there. This includes suppliers to the organisation, customers who will enter the organisation and anybody who will be there a certain times of the year such as electricians, plumbers or people carrying out maintenance on machinery.

Competence: The organisation must select persons from each department who are regarded as being competent to carry out measures that are needed to stay within the law of the state when undertaken health and safety. These people should be appointed based on their attitudes and knowledge towards health and safety. Management may feel they need to hire somebody from outside to company to be selected for a certain department if it is felt to be a higher hazard area which would need a higher level of employee in charge that has better knowledge of the laws surrounding the actions taken in this area for example within the organisation the drivers may need an employee over them to who is knowledgeable of the laws they need to know.

Implementing: To implement your plan Managing for Health and Safety HSE suggests four key steps to do so.

1) ”Decide on the preventive and protective measures needed and put them in place”.

2) “Provide the right tools and equipment do to the job and keep them maintained”.

3) “Train and instruct, to ensure everyone is competent to carry out their work”.

4) “Supervise to make sure that arrangements are followed”. (Managing for health and safety, HSE, 2013, page 46).

How to go about these steps has been discussed above but management must ensure to act on what they have planned and put in place to guarantee results are shown.

CHECK:

Measuring performance:

Reports and paperwork should always be kept up to date. After any incident/near miss take places a report should be wrote up and filed away also after machinery maintenance takes place or the organisation has plumbers and electricians conducting work a report should be wrote up regarding any finds or important information that has been gained from these maintenance checks. Continuous monitoring is vital to keep employees up to date with any information that has been discovered that may affect their health and safety.

Investigating accidents and incidents: There are numerous reasons to investigate after something has went wrong within the workplace such as legal action, wanting to claim to your insurer, finding out what has caused the accident or incident to help prevent it from happening again and knowing what has possibly happened to anybody injured to help in their treatment. It would be advised to appoint an employee to investigate accidents and incidents that has knowledge of all departments so they will know exactly what to be aware of.

ACT:

Reviewing performance: By reviewing your health and safety practices you will find out if what you are doing is actually working and being effective to see if it can be improved. What you discover from reviewing your practices and codes of action for health and safety will give you the foundation for creating your next plan of action to increase safety within the workplace. Once you have completed your review you will be in a position to see how the health and safety environment has changed in your organisation since your first plan was put in place. When you are able to see how far your health and safety practices have come along you will be able to show employees the resulting importance of what they have done and reward them.

Learning lessons: The information learnt from your review can be used to know what lessons your organisation and employees have learnt and what needs to be acted on to do so again or to change anything in the organisation that may be affecting the high levels of health and safety.

Question 2:

Following the accident of the employee being stuck and injured by a forklift which led to a small fire my procedures for dealing with the aftermath and investigation are as followed.

Procedures: Directly after the accident the employee should be moved away from the location of the incident, before moving the employee they should be asked if they feel any major injures that may be made worst if moved. If the employee feels in a stable enough condition to be moved they should be. The locate fire brigade must be contacted as they will be best equipped to deal with the fire after the accident, if the fire is minimal attempts should be made to stop it spreading with the use of a fire extinguisher,