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Archive for the ‘Workplace Health and Safety’ Category
A recent survey carried out by Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Simplyhealth entitled ‘Absence Management Survey’ has revealed that the most common reason for long-term sickness absence among manual and non-manual employees, is stress.
EssentialSkillz looks into the findings of this survey and investigates the reasons for this increasingly common workplace absentee problem.
Redundancies looming?
There’s nothing like an absent carrot to keep you motivated in your job, especially in light of austerity cut backs. Affecting most industry sectors, headcounts are being analysed, job roles are being scrutinised. “Employers planning to make redundancies in the next six months are significantly more likely to report an increase in mental health problems among their staff (51% compared with 32% who are not planning redundancies).”
Public sector no longer the ‘untouchables’
Organisational change and restructures are common place within public sector bodies, however in more recent times, the end result is leaving people without any form of job security. Gone are the sideways moves, the slotting of departments into other divisions. Put simply, Government cutbacks mean there is a reality that entire public sector initiatives/organisations are fast disappearing, whilst those that do manage to hold on to some kind of role will have to suffer pay freezes and pension cuts. Public sector respondents identify the amount of organisational change and restructuring as the number one cause of stress at work.
You spend all day working at a computer in an office, you are at risk for debilitating pain such as back pain and head aches or even permanent injury like carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive stress disorders.
Fortunately, there are a few simple things you can do to ensure a safe and pain-free office workspace.
Computer Monitor
Adjust your computer monitor brightness and resolution to minimize eye strain. Your monitor should be about a hand’s length away from your face, and situated so that you eyes and neck are resting at a natural and relaxed/neutral angle. If you are straining up, down, or to the side, this will lead to back and neck pain and head aches.
A foundry in Stoke has been fined £8,000 plus £4,798 in costs after a worker fell into an unfenced pit housing a mould containing molten metal at 900°C. The 28 year old worker suffered severe burns to his left arm and upper legs. The man who wishes not to be named, needed skin grafts on his injured limbs which are still scarred, following the incident on the 5th May 2010.
During the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) prosecution, Fenton Magistrates’ Court heard the worker is still undergoing physiotherapy for restricted movement in his arm, hand and fingers, and is so traumatised by the experience he has not been able to return to any work at the foundry.
Barry Holt, IIRSM Director of Policy and Research, notes that with membership of the EU, we have seen the introduction of a range of specific sets of regulations which has been seen as a return to the pre-health and safety at work act days.
This has, in turn, led to calls for another simplification and the review of legislation being carried out by Professor Löfstedt’s committee.
Unfortunately, some of these calls have taken the view that UK standards are inevitably higher than elsewhere and that the review should focus on repealing those sets of regulations that originated in the EU. If this approach were to be adopted, we would risk losing some good legislation that effectively filled previous gaps. It is important that we don’t let the review be hi-jacked by a xenophobic outlook.
IIRSM is concerned that the review should reinforce the need for a risk-based approach which emphasises protecting life as the key objective rather than moving back towards a compliance-based approach. The requirement of risk assessment is inherent in all recent legislation although this has led to an ‘industry’ where assessments for each activity are seen as ends in themselves.
Using the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations as the focus gives an opportunity for simplification.
On the 30th April 2010, the worker on a construction site refurbishing buildings climbed a step ladder to remove a cable. The worker assumed that the cable was dead and so attempted to remove the cable using a hammer and chisel. After the second blow, the worker has no recollection other than waking on the floor with a colleague trying to extinguish flames from the top half of his body. The worker received serious 30 – 35% burns to his body which required skin grafts.
The accident victim was a sub contractor of Pineview Interiors Ltd of Havering, London.
At the time of the incident, a 415v 3-phase temporary electrical supply had been provided to the site, and on that morning the worker explained to his supervisor that the electrical cable needed to be removed to allow plasterboard to be installed. HSE investigation revealed that Pineview undertook what HSE deemed to be ‘very limited’ enquiries as to whether this cable was in fact still live, and its workers proceeded on the false assumption that the cable being described must have been an old redundant cables from the pre-existing installation.
Health and Safety E-Learning specialists, EssentialSkillz, have re launched their complete library of 22 Health and Safety and HR E-Learning courses for health & Safety and HR training professionals.
The Health and Safety E learning courses have undergone an update to enhance the end-user experience, offering a rich graphical interface.
The entire library has been updated including content upgrades to many courses. All of the Essentialskillz courses are editable using the Authoring tool integrated into their LMS, O-LAS and all images and text can be amended by clients to ensure the courses are relevant to the intended audience.
A 24 year old worker employed by Duco International Ltd died whilst operating machinery at the the company’s premises on Slough Trading Estate as he worked on a night shift on the 15th of January 2008.
No risk assessment had been carried out on the machine he was operating at the time of the accident and the employee had not received enough training on operating the machine.
The employee was operating an automatic inspection machine, checking for flaws on rolls of rubber and cloth printing blanket when the un-witnessed accident happened. Another worker heard a “muffled cry” and discovered the deceased badly injured and trapped beneath a blanket and a roller.
The employee died of his injuries at the scene before he could be moved from the machine. It was reported that the official in charge of Health and Safety at the factory had resigned a month earlier because of concerns that an accident was going to happen.
The accident was only possible because Duco had not risk assessed the machine which had not been checked after a modification had been made. Its lack of guarding permitted access to the dangerous parts and employee information, instruction and training on the machine were inadequate.
A 32 year old worker from Polan had his arm broken in two places plus extensive soft tissue damage whilst working at a mushroom farm in Somerset. The worker was using the machine for the first time while working for Drimbawn (UK) Ltd, part of the Monaghan Mushrooms Group, when the incident occurred on 18 November 2010.
The worker was using a machine which washes the nets used to cover mushroom fields at the farm. The nets were fed into the machine which then washed them – but the clamping mechanism which held them in place as they went in was ineffective.
EssentialSkillz, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of world-class online Health & Safety training and risk assessment software solutions has launched a Whitepaper for health & Safety and HR training professionals.
Download the DSE Whitepaper by clicking here.
A good online system has the potential to transform and enhance the way you deliver and manage DSE training and risk assessment, this whitepaper considers the most important factors that Training HR and Health & safety professionals should consider when selecting an appropriate product for their business or organisation. The Whitepaper outlines the key considerations needed to ensure compliance with legislation and why so many organisations utilise technology to help them deliver and manage DSE training and risk assessment.
Since its infancy, the marketplace for DSE training Systems has been dominated by several niche providers. Each provider offers a particular solution which deals with the complexities of delivering compulsory training content and capturing DSE risk assessment data. As an e-learning application, DSE training and risk assessment has gone on to be one of the most successful e-learning deployments in many organisations.
The Whitepaper explores how different these systems are from one another and what factors a Health & Safety department should consider before choosing an online DSE system for their own particular organisation.