Whether you are taking your first steps in the world of health and safety or you are a seasoned professional with a wealth of experience the key to making sure you get everyone home safe and well every day is in making sure you have a solid foundation will put you in the best place.

Begin with the Risk Assessment

But what do we mean by getting your basics right? Well, a good place to start is in your risk assessment. Make sure you spend the time to develop comprehensive risk assessments. This doesn’t mean that they need to be pages and pages long, but they do need to capture all significant risks and have appropriate controls which have been put in place. The real secret to making sure these are right is to involve the people who actually do the job. They are best placed to tell you if a control measure is actually workable as well as highlighting risks you might not have considered.

Continue with the written instructions, training and knowledge checks

Once you’ve developed your risk assessments you then need to turn them into reality. The best way to do this is by developing clear working instructions, ensuring that everyone who needs to follow them has had enough training on them and the most important step – make sure that they actually understand them. Getting buy in for an agreed process is so much easier when people know why they are being asked to work a particular way.

It's never ‘once and done’

Don’t get complacent and think that once you’ve done a risk assessment or trained your team that the job is done. It has only just begun. You now need to make sure that the risk assessment is kept up to date. It will need to be reviewed following any changes to working practices or equipment and following incidents. It also needs to have a regular review, even if none of these things have happened.

In the same way your team will never stand still. Makes sure you regularly check the competence of your team in terms of their knowledge of the process as well as their understanding of the control measures and the behaviour they demonstrate. Individuals who are reckless or cut corners pose a risk to themselves and others, even if they are technically competent in the task at hand. .You also need to be mindful of the risk of skills fade where individuals have any significant gaps in carrying out certain activities.

And Finally…

Remember, safety is a team game. We all need to learn from each other and the best way to do this is to build your network of likeminded professionals. Whether you are looking into something for the first time or making changes to prevent a reoccurrence of an incident, an outside opinion can often be incredibly helpful.

Taking every day as a school day and taking the opportunity to learn and develop will ultimately make you the best H&S professional you can be.