Managing health and safety:health survey-3

Step 3: Plan and set standards

    Planning is the key to ensuring that your health and safety efforts really work. Planning for health and safety involves setting objectives, identifying hazards, assessing risks, implementing standards of performance and developing a positive culture. It is often useful to record your plans in writing.

Your planning should provide for:
■identifying hazards and assessing risks, and deciding how they can be eliminated or controlled;
■complying with the health and safety laws that apply to your business;
■agreeing health and safety targets with managers and supervisors;
■a purchasing and supply policy which takes health and safety into account;
■design of tasks, processes, equipment, products and services, safe systems of work;
■procedures to deal with serious and imminent danger;
■cooperation with neighbours, and/or subcontractors;
■setting standards against which performance can be measured.

Standards help to build a positive culture and control risks. They set out what people in your organisation will do to deliver your policy and control risk. They should identify who does what, when and with what result. Three key points about standards
Standards must be:
■measurable;
■achievable;
■realistic.

Statements such as 'staff must be trained' are difficult to measure if you don't know exactly what 'trained' means and who is to do the work. 'All machines will be guarded' is difficult to achieve if there is no measure of the adequacy of the guarding.
Many industrybased standards already exist and you can adopt them where applicable. In other cases you will have to take advice and set your own, preferably referring to numbers, quantities and levels which are seen to be realistic and can be checked.
For example:
■completing risk assessments and implementing the controls required;
■maintaining workshop temperatures within a specified range;
■specifying levels of waste, effluent or emissions that are acceptable;
■specifying methods and frequency for checking guards on machines, ergonomic design criteria for tasks and workstations, levels of training;
■arranging to consult staff or their representatives at set intervals;
■monitoring performance in particular ways at set times.

Ask yourself:

1 Do you have a health and safety plan?
2 Is health and safety always considered before any new work is started?
3 Have you identified hazards and assessed risks to your own staff and the public, and set standards for premises, plant, substances, procedures, people and products?
4 Do you have a plan to deal with serious or imminent danger, eg fires, process deviations etc?
5 Are the standards put in place and risks effectively controlled?

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