Health & Safety in the Workplace

As an employer, you have a duty of care to ensure that anyone who is in your workplace is safe. That includes members of the public, employees, customers and even delivery drivers making deliveries.

This is a big responsibility and it can feel that it is really difficult to manage the risks associated with anyone coming into your workplace. Still, there are steps you can take to protect yourself and everyone else who comes into your premises.

Your employees are the people who are likely to be affected by your health and safety policies and you should ensure that they are protected at all times. You can assess the risks associated with your particular business – for example, working in an office is deemed a low-risk environment but working on a building site is high risk. This indicates how likely an accident is to happen at your workplace.

This can also help you to tailor your risk assessments so they meet the particular needs of your business. The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 has regulations that accompany this Act. These regulations focus on different elements of Health and Safety at work.

Some of these are:

•          The Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations
•          Manual Handling Operations Regulations
•          Display Screen Equipment (DSE) Regulations
•          Workplace (Health, Safety & Welfare) Regulations
•          Provision and use of Work Equipment Regulations
•          Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Regulations

These were originally called the ‘Six Pack’ regulations because there were six, but there were more added to cover things such as manual handling, reporting of injuries, disease and dangerous incidences, noise at work and control of substances at work, among others.

Depending on your workplace, some of these regulations will apply and some will not. In order to clearly understand the risks involved, you should carry out a risk assessment for your business. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have a number of example risk assessments on their website to help you to complete this process. This allows you to assess and manage the risks.

If someone has an accident at your work premises, you may expose yourself to a claim against you but by making your workplace as safe as possible and minimising the risk, you can go a long way to protecting yourself.

If you would like more information about the impact of accidents at work on your business and the risks associated with health and safety at work regulations, please call Richard Gregory on 01264 325811 or email him at rgregory@bsandi.co.uk and he will be happy to discuss this with you.