Being safe at work is a fundamental principle to both employers and employees. Health and safety in the workplace shouldn’t be taken lightly, it is the employer’s responsibility to provide information and training to employees about safety requirements and risks involved at work. No matter what size the organisation, it is vital they have the proper health and safety processes in place. For some organisations, where they don’t have the capacity to handle this internally, they reach out to health and safety consultants.
What is a Health and Safety Consultant?
A health and safety consultant is a professional service role, offering advice and guidance to organisations and employers. Their job is to assist organisations to reduce health and safety risks in the workplace, as well as providing best practice consultancy to manage the process internally more efficiently.
Your heath and safety consultant should be registered and qualified. Some qualifications you can expect to find are NEBOSH, NCRQ and IOSH. Day to day tasks of a health and safety consultant includes producing safety policies and procedures, auditing business processes, advising and training on health and safety practices, carrying out risk assessments and much more.
Health and safety consultants are highly knowledgeable and are able to adapt to your organisations industry. Many public service organisations outsource their H&S services as they do not have the capacity to handle this internally. H&S advisors can work across many industries, including charities, third sector, construction, franchises, care sector and manufacturing.
Health and Safety Consultancy Tools
Implementing new processes can be hard as employees can be resistant to change. Measuring health and safety performance and efficiency is also difficulty as you cannot gain quantifiable data. What health and safety tools give your organisation, is the ability to measure performance as a result of efficient health and safety procedures, whilst providing a safe working environment for everyone by identifying and reducing hazards in the workplace.
Audit of Your Health and Safety System
Health and safety consultants offer a range of services to employers and organisations that improve their H&S processes. These services can start with an audit of your existing processes, procedures and standards. The health and safety audit gives employers an indication of where they are at with regards to managing safety and recommend improvements on how to best approach health and safety management in their industry. Consultants begin by assessing key practices against both legal responsibilities and best practices. Your consultant will investigate where you may be liable from a statutory or civil perspective and provide an easy to use action plan that will outline priority areas.
The aim of the health and safety audit is to identify the key areas where your organisation can improve their health and safety practices and processes. Your consultant will then work with you to deliver the tools and put in place best practices to make your health and safety management a more efficient process.
Professional H&S Policy
How you manage your health and safety processes will tell your staff, stakeholders and shareholders how committed you are to the safety in your workplace.
After auditing and advising on best practice Health and Safety processes, a useful tool to refer to is a health and safety policy. This official document is used by employers as a set of commitments and arrangements for managing health and safety practices in the workplace. A H&S Policy is a legal requirement if you have five or more employees and is best practice if you have less than this.a
This official document doesn’t need to be confusing, and your health and safety consultant can assist by producing this for you.
Once you have your health and safety policy in place, it is almost useless unless it is effectively utilised. It is important for managers to act upon this H&S policy, enforcing regulations in the workplace and carrying out training. Both employees and employers need to regularly review the document to ensure a safe and productive health and safety practices.
Assess Hazards and Risk Assessments
Many organisations attempt to carry out risk assessments and health and safety audits themselves. However, this can be counterproductive as the job may not be completed to a high enough standard.
As an employer, you cannot eliminate all risks in a workplace. But it is a legal requirement and the employer’s responsibility to minimise and control these risks in the workplace.
Outsourcing your organisations H&S services means that professionals visit your workplace and conduct risk assessments on your behalf. This means a guaranteed qualified consultant that will deliver risk assessments to industry regulatory standards.
The risk assessment process can begin with a health and safety audit, your consultant will then create a bespoke, compliant written record of the risk assessment. Your Health and safety advisor then produces a report with an easy to follow action plan that sets priority ratings.
Outsource Health and Safety Support
Thousands of organisations across the UK outsource their health and safety processes. This allows them to keep up to date with legislation changes and reduce workplace risks. As an employer, there are many benefits to reaching out and getting health and safety support.
Bespoke Health and Safety consultancy services take care of everything for you, from policy creation to workplace audits and risk assessments. Custom-made services dive deep into your business to provide the most accurate policies delivered by dedicated advisors.
Contact us today to see how we can help your business finalise their health and safety processes. Arrange a visit from one of our expert health and safety consultants to carryout an inspection or review your existing policies and risk assessments.
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