Last week, we attended the Avon Occupational Safety & Health Group (AOSH) annual Health & Safety Executive (HSE) review. The speaker, an HSE inspector, covered significant accidents and prosecutions from the previous year and highlighted upcoming focus areas for the national regulator in the coming months.
Here’s Our Summary of the Key Points:
Dust Control: There is continued focus on dust from brickwork and woodworking, which is now expanding to other industries such as manufacturing and food production.
Health Surveillance: There is an ongoing priority on noise, vibration, vision, and manual handling. Employers must ensure employees’ health is not impacted by their work.
Isocyanates: Exposure to Isocyanates is one of the leading causes of occupational asthma in this country. There is increased scrutiny on businesses using these chemicals.
Public Sector Inspections: HSE will be visiting schools and public sector companies to ensure effective management of legionella, asbestos, and RAAC. They want to see a proven management plan, to include routine inspections, photographs, documented changes, etc.
We have worked with Safewell for many years and are retained clients, so we have developed an excellent working relationship with the team. However, this really came into its own when Covid 19 appeared.
As a Plumbing and Heating business, we were able to carry on working during the lockdown but only for responding to emergencies. We were obviously very concerned about the health and safety of our employees and before we even had chance to get in touch with Safewell, they had emailed us offering their assistance. It is hard to put down on paper how that made us feel - we like everyone else felt totally at sea, which way to turn, what to do? But Safewell were there guiding, supporting and being totally brilliant. Their attention to detail is very impressive and reassuring and we feel able to ask lots of questions without feeling silly.
During the pandemic Safewell helped us to write risk assessments, safety procedures and protocols. They kept in touch regularly, issuing new guidance as soon as it appeared and checking in with us. They held group Q&A sessions over Zoom which were helpful, and knowing other businesses were facing the same challenges and having the opportunity to discuss issues was invaluable. Their help during the preparation for a full return to work was brilliant, they enabled us to be fully prepared and feel in control, and when we had our first case of Covid within the team, because we had planned our response it felt ok.
I think our team felt very reassured by our robust approach and that our office was Covid secure. We are extremely grateful to all the team at Safewell
