Facts About Health And Safety

Health and safety in the workplace is a subject that causes a certain amount of division across all sectors of business. There is an incorrect supposition that health and safety is superfluous, and exists for its own sake.

However, the fact remains that health and safety needs to be taken seriously, and the reasons behind its importance need to be better understood.

Health and Safety Legislation

In the first instance, safety matters in the workplace are covered by statutory legislation under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Broadly speaking, this binds employers to rules that ensure the safety of employees whilst at work. In addition to this, employees are also bound by the same legislation to do everything in their power to ensure their own safety and that of their colleagues.

For certain breaches of health and safety, there are severe civil penalties, and criminal penalties also exist for serious breaches of the act resulting in death or injury.

However, health and safety is about more than just compliance with legislation: it came into being as a response to accidents in the workplace, many of them fatal. The purpose of the legislation was initially to provide protection to employees, so it is also in the interest of workers to take such legislation seriously. Prior to the introduction of legislation, workplaces had been extremely treacherous environments, and the wellbeing of employees had often been placed secondary to the profits of company owners.

Workplace incidents

Unfortunately, whilst the introduction of legislation has undoubtedly reduced accidents, the statistics regarding workplace accidents still make grim reading. In the UK, there were 133 people killed at work in the last year, and 78,000 injuries reported under Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 (RIDDOR). This has resulted in 28.2 million days off work, a massive cost to businesses and the economy. (Source: www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/)

This proves that more needs to be done to improve health and safety in the workplace. As part of an employer’s existing obligations, there is also a requirement that staff are properly trained in health and safety matters. For employers, taking the extra expense to train employees could pay dividends in reduced sick absence in the workplace. For employees, taking the time to attend additional training in health and safety could potentially save their own lives and those of others around them.

Employees in particular need to consider the effect on both themselves and their employers. Voluntarily undertaking extra training can make them more employable in the long run, whereas the personal cost of accidents can result in long periods of unemployment. Accidents can cost employers money resulting in redundancies, and both this and the cost of sick absence can result in lost jobs.

Employees and employers should work together to make workplaces safer. Greater access to good quality training could help to dramatically reduce the incidence of accidents at work, and this would have a positive effect on businesses and the economy as a whole.

At Euro 1 Training we provide health and safety training for a variety of purposes, from first aid to fire safety, we can help you and your staff improve health and safety levels on your premises.