What Is A Safety Statement
A Safety Statement is a plan, in writing, which specifically identifies the hazards, assesses the risks, identifies the controls to be put in place, the persons responsible and resources necessary to secure the safety of persons at work. It is required by Section 20 of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005.
Create A Safety Statement
We create comprehensive Safety Statement’s in line with legislative requirements which addresses the major safety management, consultation and operational issues that apply to your activities.
The Safety Statement should be made available to all employees and other persons who may be affected by your activities.
The Safety Statement is reviewed on an annual basis or when there are legislative or work practice changes.
Who Is Responsible
Responsibility for safety proceeds from the Board of Directors, through the Managing Director, to all senior management and in turn to each manager, supervisor, team leader, and member of staff. It is the responsibility of all line management to ensure that employees are trained and motivated to comply with our company’s safety policy, safety statements, safety rules, procedures, safety standards and relevant laws.
Line management also has a responsibility to keep fully informed of the impact that activities under its control and ensure that they take corrective action as appropriate.
Equally all employees have a responsibility to protect their own safety and that of others affected by their work, to avoid behaviours that could result in injury to others and to cooperate in implementing the safety policy, rules, standards, procedures and guidelines.
Risk Assessments
In your workplace there will be a variety of different activities taking place, these may require an employee to clean a part using chemicals, to lift a heavy load or to work in an area where there is a high noise level. These work activities present risks to employees’ health and safety.
A risk assessment is a necessary and useful task in tackling the risk of ill health at work. All employers are required to carry out a risk assessment at their place of work and to keep a written record of that risk assessment.
This course will explain the practical steps that you can take to comply with this legal requirement.
It will
- Provide direction on risk assessment.
- Outline the risk assessment process.
- Provide examples of the relationship between risk assessment and workplace health.
Conducting effective risk assessment helps you to target the hazards that have real potential to cause harm and to put improvements or control measures in place to reduce the likelihood of anyone being harmed. The benefits of conducting a risk assessment include increased productivity, reduced risk of ill health, reduced absenteeism and related costs and reduced exposure to injury and associated compensation claims.
Basic Risk Assessment Terminology.
It is important at this stage to outline the key terminology associated with the risk assessment process.
A risk assessment is a written document that records a three-step process:
1. Identifying the hazards in the workplace(s) under your control.
2. Assessing the risks presented by these hazards, and
3. Putting control measures in place to reduce the risk of these hazards causing harm.
There are five important terms you need to understand when doing a risk assessment:
Hazard:
Anything with the potential to cause injury or ill health, for example chemical substances, dangerous moving machinery, or threats of violence from others.
Risk:
Risk is the chance that someone will be harmed by the hazard. It also takes account of how severe the harm or
ill health could be and how many people could be affected. Because risk is a combination of chance (or likelihood) and severity, it is worthwhile considering both of these terms.
Chance (or likelihood):
Chance is a measure of how likely it is that an accident could happen. When people are working safely there is
less chance that an accident will occur.
Severity:
Severity is a measure of how serious an injury or health effect could be, as a consequence of unsafe working or of an accident. The severity can be influenced by the following:
• the environment,
• the number of people at risk, and
• the steps already taken to control the hazard.
Control Measures:
Control measures are simply what steps you are going to take to remove the hazards, or at least reduce the risk of them causing harm to as low a level as possible.
Risk Assessment Legislation
Section 19 of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 requires that employers and those who control workplaces to any extent must identify the hazards in the workplaces under their control and assess the risks to safety and health at work presented by these hazards.
Employers must examine and write down these workplace risks and what to do about them. Ultimately, assessing risk means that anything in the workplace that could cause harm to your employees, other employees and other people (including customers, visitors and members of the public) must be carefully examined. This allows you to estimate the magnitude of risk and decide whether the risk is acceptable or whether more precautions need to be taken to prevent harm.
Call us today today to talk about your companies safety statement (046) 924 5658
Let’s Chat