Health and safety is a legal requirement, and your company needs to have a policy on how it deals with health and safety.
Health and safety might seem like one of those jobs that aren’t important and that you can avoid doing. However, health and safety is a legal requirement, and your company needs to have a policy on how it deals with health and safety. With that in mind, here are three things that you should not forget to include in your health and safety policy.
Risk Assessment
Every health and safety policy needs a risk assessment. For your company, you might need to do several. You need to look at the work you are doing, where you are doing it and think about what the related potential risks are. You will then need to decide what your company will do in the event of these situations. This might something as simple as what you will do if someone gets boiling water on them to what you will do in the event of a fire. Each one needs to be clearly defined and planned for and dispersed to your employees. You need to make sure that everyone has read and understood the risk assessments. This might be a time consuming and lengthy processes depending on what your company does. However, once it is done you likely won’t need to do anything other than making small changes and updates each year or when things change. This means that by spending the initial time, you can craft risk assessments that you will use for years to come.
Working With Contractors
Working with contractors is a tricky thing, and you need to make sure that you understand all of the legal responsibilities you have. You don’t want one of them to injure themselves and for it to end up being due to something that was your responsibility. If this happens, then they may file a legal claim (https://www.derricklawfirm.com) against your company. Within your health and safety policy you should have a contractors section, and within that, you can outline all of the responsibilities of contractors and those of the company. When you have new contractors, you need to make sure that they read and sign this section of the health and safety policy.
Company Specific Activities
Each and every company will have specific things that only they do. Anything health and safety related to these practices will need to be included in the health and safety policy. This will include things like your offices or property, any work that you do both on and off-site as well as anything else that relates to how your business is run. A company that works in the healthcare sector is going to have a very different health and safety policy that one that works in the financial sector. This is because they have different standards of health and safety and the type of working being done is very different, too. What you need to when crafting your own health and safety policy is take a good look at all of the things that your company does and think about any potential health and safety related risks. You can refer to your risk assessments for certain areas. Looking up a template is also a good idea.
