As a business owner, you must never neglect health and safety and ensure that it is a priority in your workplace. You have a legal responsibility to prove a safe work environment for your team, but you will also want to provide a safe work environment, so that your team feels happy, safe, and confident at work. Accidents and injuries can harm the business in many ways, so you must take action to reduce the chances of this occurring. With this in mind, this post will offer a few tips for improving health and safety that should help you to create a safer workplace for your team.
Get a Risk Assessment Carried Out
First, you should get a risk assessment carried out by a specialist. You are likely to be aware of the main hazards in your business, but there might be others that are less obvious, but also very dangerous. A specialist will be able to highlight all the hazards in your place of work, so that you can then remove these hazards, or find ways to mitigate them. This will also give you reassurance knowing that the risks have all been identified.
Provide Regular Training
Accidents and injuries in the workplace often occur because staff do not know how to carry out their role safely. Therefore, training is so important when it comes to health and safety and why you should provide regular training to keep the messages fresh in peoples’ minds. This training will then help staff to work safely and with confidence each day.
Provide Health & Safety Training
You should also provide health and safety training for your team and appoint a health and safety officer. This way, if there is an incident, then your team will be able to respond instantly and take action to minimize the impact of the accident/injury.
Infographic created by DuroVac – osha compliant vacuum
Encourage Team to Come Forward
You also need to make sure that communication is forthcoming when it comes to health and safety in the workplace. Encourage your team to speak up if they have any questions, ideas, or concerns when it comes to anything health and safety related. You also need to make sure that all near misses are reported, so that you can learn and improve for next time and reduce the chance of an injury being sustained.
Have First-Aid Kits on Hand
You must always have first-aid kits on hand in your place of work, no matter what industry you work in. You can get OSHA-compliant commercial first aid kits online that will provide you with everything that you need to give first aid in the workplace. These kits should be mounted on the wall so that staff can quickly access the kit in an emergency.
Put Up Safety Signage
You should also have health and safety signs put up around the business. This is useful because it will keep important information at the forefront of your workers’ minds while they are carrying out their work, but it will also provide key information for anyone that is visiting the business. Make sure that these signs are clear, placed in relevant spots, and easy to see for all.
Learn from Accidents & Near Misses
It is unfortunate, but accidents and injuries do occur in the workplace and there are some industries where these can be common. It is always important that you take the time to learn from accidents and any near misses, so that improvements can be made moving forward. Most accidents in the workplace are preventable, so you should take the time to work out what went wrong and how the accident could be avoided in the future.
Use PPE
You should also make sure that you provide your team with access to high-quality PPE. The kind of PPE will depend on the type of work that they are carrying out and the risks, but this equipment can allow them to work safely and with confidence each day and reduce the chance of an incident.
You need to have rules in place to enforce the wearing of this PPE as sometimes staff can forget/not bother to wear PPE, and this can put them in danger.
Hopefully, the advice in this post will prove to be useful and help you to improve health and safety in your business. This needs to be a priority for business owners and not just because you have a legal responsibility to provide a safe work environment. You never want to see your employees suffer, and an accident could end up costing the business in several different ways, as well as change lives for the employee and their families. The above tips should reduce the chance of an incident and give you and your team confidence each day.
Hi, I’m the Founder and Developer of Paramedics World, a blog truly devoted to Paramedics. I am a Medical Lab Tech, a Web Developer and Bibliophiliac. My greatest hobby is to teach and motivate other peoples to do whatever they wanna do in life.