Absolutely it is. 5,500 people die every year in the UK alone from diseases caused by exposure to asbestos. Worldwide, 742,000 die every year from work-related cancers including those caused by exposure to asbestos. Are these asbestos-related deaths in the UK just the result of legacy exposures? Or, only caused by fly-by-night operators cutting corners? No, and no. The NHS alone has … Read More
Permit-to-Work from Home
***For the duration of the current Government coronavirus lockdown, we are making the Electronic Signatures and PPE modules available to clients free of charge, thereby, enabling more people to work from home while keeping building maintenance workers safe.*** With the current Covid-19 crisis and Government lockdown many of us are forced to work from home while many are faced with … Read More
Working from Home Guidance
There have been many good, well-intentioned articles in both the print press and online over the past week about how to successfully work from home. The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday (March 17th) advocated working from 9am to 5pm to maximise overlap with colleagues and speed decision making. Google recommend creating “work” triggers for your brain such as establishing a designated … Read More
So, is Numerology Bunkum?
At the end of last year we welcomed in 2020 with a cheerful note on what we had to look forward in this year of symmetrical numbers. We cheerily looked at the positives we, as a health and safety industry, could take from Brexit, Data/Technology and Wellness, and did this with the backdrop of the Numerologists’ view that 2020 would … Read More
2020 Health and Safety Webinar Series
Following is the 2020 schedule for our ongoing series of health and safety webinars. Mark your calendars as appropriate. You can access/register for past/upcoming webinars via the left sidebar of this page. 12th March – Contractor Compliance, Needs Vision not Hindsight As technology advancements and global political and macro-economic trends continue to impact the worker landscape, so we’re already seeing … Read More
Contractor Compliance in 2020 – Needs Vision not Hindsight
Greg Markham, Technical Director of EMCOR UK described e-permits as, “The Best Way to Control Contractors that I’ve Ever Seen”. He further described the pros and cons of e-permits as follows: e-permits Pros Logical, easy to use and covers all aspects of Contractor Control. Places the onus on the Contractor to supply the necessary detail, but also on the controllers … Read More
The Stress Tsunami
Since Christmas I’ve read two books: John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and Andrew Yang’s ‘The War on Normal People’. Steinbeck tale of the Joad’s displacement from their 1930s dust bowl farm in Oklahoma and migration to the promised land of California is probably well known to the reader. That their displacement was caused by automation and greedy landowners/big business, … Read More
Aligning Health and Safety With Business Growth (Part 2 of 2)
In the first part of this two-part post, we discussed why health and safety needs to be aligned with the growth of the business and, at all costs, to avoid being seen as a cost centre. How do we, therefore, make health and safety a keystone habit? Something the business obsesses over and which, ultimately, becomes the engine of business … Read More
Aligning Health and Safety With Business Growth (Part 1 of 2)
In our last post on the changing role of the Health and Safety Manager we posited that there is an ever increasing requirement for the H&S Manager to justify their existence and that the most enduring way to provide this justification is to align health and safety performance with the growth of the business. The alternatives to aligning with growth … Read More
The H&S (Swiss Army Knife) Manager
In the heat of the summer of 2018, we discussed how technology could become the rallying call to attract younger people into the health and safety profession. Eighteen months on we revisit the subject, but more broadly with the remit of exploring the changing role of the Health and Safety Manager. The original post coincided with SHP’s launch of New … Read More
Improving Risk Management in Financial Services
The global banking and the broader financial services industry leaves the last decade on a much more solid footing than it left the previous decade. Then, the financial crisis had wreaked its chaos but now, as Deloitte notes, “The global banking system is not only bigger and more profitable but also more resilient than at any time in the last … Read More
Flexible Working and Finnish Trust
I don’t know what the commute is like in Finland but I doubt it comes close to that suffered by the majority of us in the UK. Yet, while the Finns brought the latest version of their Working Hours Act into effect on Jan 1, 2020, I spent 3 hours driving the 50 miles to Southampton last week through the … Read More
Ruminating Cows, Trojan Horses and More Reasons to be Cheerful in 2020
This is the third in the trilogy of posts taking an optimistic look at UK health and safety issues in 2020. The first focused on Brexit, the second on the role that data and technology can play in improving health and safety outcomes, while this one is all about ruminating cows and trojan horses [really? – Ed]. OK, seriously, we’ll … Read More
2020 Vision – More Reasons to be Cheerful
In our last post of 2019, we started this trilogy of optimistic looks into UK health and safety in 2020. This post, the second of the three, focuses on the optimism afforded by data and technology. Are we talking about using data and technology in isolation? As a replacement for human reasoning? No. Or, data and technology as an adjunct … Read More
2020 Vision – 3 Reasons to be Cheerful
2020 has the look of a great year. Just the numbers laid out beside each other. 2019 appeared awkward (and it was, very) but 2020 has a calming, hopeful look to it. It’s an Olympic year and there’s something Olympian about the way the numbers sit on the page. I’ve never studied Numerology but I Googled ‘2020’ and, sure enough, … Read More
Toxic Schools
The recent political landscape in the UK has left some/many(?) wondering if our political classes are really capable of making and managing the changes needed to help us prosper and keep us safe. This latest election campaign has often represented a drunken brawl in the street among candidates purporting to stand on a law and order ticket. Feel free to … Read More
