A hazard is something that could cause harm to someone. Our managers who are being proactive about health and safety therefore have to try to identify potential hazards before they actually do cause any harm.
A hazard can further be defined in three áreas, as follows:
- Exposure to harm
- Something with the potential to do harm , this can include substances or machines, methods of work and other aspects of work organisation
- The result of departure form the normal situation, which has the potential to cause death, injury, damage or loss.
Our Operations can use these standards to measure their achievements in term of stress management. The stress management standards are not legally enforceable on organisations but the Health, Safety and Environment may use them as evidence that an organisation is not fulfilling its duty with regard to stress management. The Health, Safety and Environment has already issued an improvement order against one organisation for failing to manage stress adequately.
The standards address six areas of work that we should be audited. The basic idea is to ascertain what percentages of staff feel that they are able to cope with any work situations in these six áreas. According to stress the target is for all organizations to match the performance of the top 20% of we that are successfully minimizing work-related stress. Our Company must also be able to show that they have systems in place locally to respond to any individual concerns and should be carrying out risk assessments for stress. Control of substances hazardous to health regulations. Apart form some minor changes to tidy up Our Regulations.
Our design is to protect anyone who Works with substances that could be hazardous to health. The regulations apply to all workplaces and include all substances with the exception of asbestos, lead, materials that produce ionising radiation and substances underground, which all have their own separate legislation. The legislation basically applies to any other substances that can cause harm by being inhaled, ingested, coming into contact with the skin, or being injected or introduced into the body so they do cover a very wide range of substances.
Our regulations require all our Operations, to carry out an assessment of risks to our employees from substances that are identified in the workplace as being potentially hazardous to either their employees or others who might be affected, any risks that are identified must then be controlled.
While it would be easy to assume that these regulations would not have much effect on ordinary workplace, this is not in fact the case, as many of the substances identified as potentially hazardous will be found in any workplace, for example fluid for photocopies or cleaning products, so in reality all workplaces are affected.
The main áreas that employers should focus on are:
- Assessing the risk of substances used and identifying the required precautions
- Introducing appropriate measure to control or prevent the risk
- Ensuring the correct use of the control measures, and the equipment is regularly maintained
- Conducting health surveillance to monitor health of employees where there is a known identifiable risk
- Informing and training employees about risks that may arise from their work, and informing them of the necessary precautions to take