If a fire breaks out on your premises, an evacuation chair could make the difference between life and death for a disabled worker on the second floor. You can’t use the lifts if there is such an emergency. But an evacuation chair, which rarely needs to be used,...
At last, the UK is coming out of our deep recession, so they say. The economy has started to recover. Great news, but for health and safety professionals this also rings some warning bells. In the past, when the country moved into a recovery phase following a...
Even local authorities are not immune to the penalties imposed for contravening health and safety regulations. Several case studies on The Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) website describe failings by councils that have caused serious injuries to staff or...
Dr Alistair Bromhead and his colleagues are recognised as leading experts on health and safety issues. They have seen a marked increase in the number of Health and Safety Executive Improvement Notices issued recently in some sectors, possibly a reflection of target...
A year and a quarter into the Health & Safety Executive’s Fee for Intervention Scheme (FFI), its inspectors seem to be taking a hard line in issuing improvement notices. It’s not unusual to receive several of them per visit, and one company had as many...
When you arrange induction programmes for new recruits, how much time do you allow for the area of safe manual handling? Is it difficult to fit it in with everything else that needs to be communicated in a session of an hour or two? In many companies, another worker...
The end of October saw the publication of annual statistics on work related injuries and ill health for the year 2013-14. Although numbers of fatalities were fewer than the previous year, there were still 133 deaths, while around 2 million people are suffering from an...
Evacuation chairs are a vital lifeline, used to transport less able bodied persons located anywhere from the first floor upwards out of a building in the event of an emergency. So it is somewhat surprising to find that in many educational organisations and public...
When employers have arranged manual handling training for their members of staff, they might think that’s all that is needed for about three years, both to comply with health and safety rules and to avoid injuries due to bad handling techniques. But even after a...
Most trainers in manual handling would expect to take a refresher course every three years, although this is not mandatory. The need to keep up to date on developments in their subject is particularly important, given its health and safety context. Their training must...
