Health and safety plans and tools
Find the most useful and practical way for you to display health and safety information. You can write it down on paper, but if it’s not likely that people will read it, find another way – for example, pin up a laminated image of how to safely use machine guarding.
You must have a health and safety culture that’s open, honest and collaborative. This will:
- get everyone at work actively thinking and learning about health and safety
- give them ownership of it so they all do what they need to.
You should also have:
- some workers who are trained in first aid
- an up-to-date first aid kit
- emergency planning procedures in place
- continuity and contingency planning procedures in place
- emergency contact details for each worker on file.
Learning from incidents
You can’t expect your work will always be completely healthy and safe. Injuries, illnesses, incidents and near misses happen. When they do, you and your workers must take the time to review and learn from them.
Depending on the nature, severity and complexity of the incident, learning from a health and safety incident might be as simple as chatting to staff afterwards so you can all try to figure out what went wrong, and what can be done about it.
A more formal way to do this is to keep an incident register and to use it as part of your in-house follow-ups.
Keeping an incident register
If you do want to keep an incident register, you should include:
- near misses
- incidents
- occupational illnesses (or signs of such illnesses)
- who was involved or affected
- what happened
- where and when it happened
- what happened after the event.
Apart from recording incidents in the register, you should also:
- get worker input into how the register should work
- make sure all staff know where the register is and how to fill it in
- always keep your register in the same place so it’s easy to find.
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