HSE Informative Document - 5 Steps to Health & Safety Success

Switch Management regularly give out this article to its customers as it is a useful tool in being successful regarding Health & Safety.

To save you reading the whole article here are the most useful tips, if you would still like to read the full article please click here

Step 1: Set your policy

The same sorts of event that cause injuries and illness can also lead to property damage and interrupt production so you must aim to control all accidental loss. Identifying hazards and assessing risks,* deciding what precautions are needed, putting them in place and checking they are used, protects people, improves quality, and safeguards plant and production.

Step 2: Organise your staff
To make your health and safety policy effective you need to get your staff involved and committed. This is often referred to as a 'positive health and safety culture'.
The four 'Cs' of positive health and safety culture

1. 1  Competence: recruitment, training and advisory support.
   
2. 2  Control: allocating responsibilities, securing commitment, instruction and
   supervision.
   
3. 3  Co-operation: between individuals and groups.
   
4. 4  Communication: spoken, written and visible.
   
   

Step 3: Plan and set standards

Planning is the key to ensuring that your health and safety efforts really work. Planning for health and safety involves setting objectives, identifying hazards, assessing risks, implementing standards of performance and developing a positive culture. It is often useful to record your plans in writing. 

Step 4: Measure your performance
Just like finance, production or sales, you need to measure your health and safety performance to find out if you are being successful. You need to know:
I where you are;
I where you want to be;
I what is the difference - and why.

Step 5: Learn from experience - audit and review

Monitoring provides the information to let you review activities and decide how to improve performance. Audits, by your own staff or outsiders, complement monitoring activities by looking to see if your policy, organisation and systems are actually achieving the right results. They tell you about the reliability and effectiveness of your systems. Learn from your experiences. Combine the results from measuring performance with information from audits to improve your approach to health and safety management.