Health and Safety as we know it has only been around for a few decades. Previously factories, designers and builders had few regulations to abide to and took little consideration about the safety of their workers. Now a long list of regulations, guidelines and rules are set in place to provide all the protection possible to workers and consumers. However, because of its relative novelty many managers and decision makers are struggling with the practicalities of managing risk.
The purpose of health and safety rules is to assess the risk of every dangerous activity in a job and allow for measures to reduce or remove a danger. This can be done, as we will see, in a variety of ways. In order of preference, a dangerous situation should be removed from a job description.
This short article will look into the factors that determine the occupational safety of a worker and the job he carries out. In doing so we will focus on two main elements of this discipline, risk and hazard. By understanding how these two elements interact with each other we will understand better what is involved in H&S exercises.
Finally, risk can be managed by reducing the danger through the use of protection gear. This is the last resort because the likelihood of workers forgetting their equipment or of it losing its efficiency is high.
What does risk mean? Risk in this context refers to the likelihood of something bad occurring. For instance the risk of someone tripping in a building site is higher if it is untidy, has cables laid across the ground.
Hazard, describes the potential damage a situation can create. For instance an airplane crashing into an airport is a very serious hazard. The life toll and financial expense would be huge. A health and safety inspector would rate it as a high level danger. However, just because the danger level of an event is high does not mean something must be done about it. A cow falling on your head from a building could cause some serious damage, probably kill you. But the chances of this happening are minimal.
Once each of these elements is assessed individually the results are combined to provide the overall risk. If this is over a certain benchmark then the activity must be either stopped or measures must be taken to reduce either the risk or hazard.
The government assigns supervisors to inspect factories, building sites and hospitals to make sure every company has an active H&S plan and are sticking to it. This plan assesses all the dangerous activities carried out by the workers and managers, and is the basis on which to build a safe and healthy work environment.
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