Today is World Day for Safety and Health at Work 2021. Perhaps now is a good time to reflect on how we’re doing in the UK with respect to our worker safety performance. Those in the health and safety industry and everyone with an interest in minimising workplace fatalities are eagerly waiting on the next official report from the Health … Read More
What’s New in Health & Safety Technology?
Technology advances at a rapid pace, changing the way businesses operate. The field of health and safety is no different. So, what are the new technologies and technological trends that are impacting health and safety? The most obvious one is the increasing digitalisation of health and safety processes and systems, where those processes and systems move from being manual to … Read More
Do Existing Health and Safety Regulations Support Changing Work Practices?
Businesses in most industries have dramatically transformed their operations over the past 12 months to adapt to the realities of Covid-19 and the restrictions that have been introduced to help deal with the pandemic. Many of these transformations have had significant health and safety implications. As the progress of the vaccination programme continues at pace, many of us are now … Read More
SafeContractor and e-permits: Better Safety Outcomes, Greater Efficiencies
Back in October of last year, we introduced a full safety management solution made possible by the acquisition of Banyard Solutions by Alcumus. The long term vision we always had was to build out that full suite of safety software products to complement our standalone permit-to-work product, e-permits. The acquisition brought that long term vision into immediate focus. e-permits is … Read More
Workplace Fatal Injuries in Great Britain, 2020
The provisional Workplace fatal injuries in Great Britain, 2020 data were released by the HSE last week showing a decline in workplace fatalities from 149 in 2018/19 to 111 in 2019/20. While every one of the 111 fatalities is a tragic loss, the decrease in fatalities from 149, and indeed from the previous 5-year average (an annual average of 143 … Read More
Using Predictive Analytics to Improve Safety Performance
In 2011 the New York Times reported that the Santa Cruz police department arrested two women in a downtown car park. One for possession of illegal drugs, the other had outstanding warrants, both were peering into car windows when the police arrived. What was unusual about the incident was the fact that the police were alerted by a computer program … Read More
Realigning Health and Safety in the Business
Over the last year or so we’ve posited ideas around having health and safety become a keystone habit in the business and aligning health and safety outcomes with business growth and why doing so was important. We highlighted three categorisations for how health and safety is viewed within the business: as a cost centre as delivering business benefits as a … 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
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
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
Let’s Hope this Post Helps You Sleep
It’s not every health and safety blog post that links Baader-Meinhof, Inspector Morse and has the express intent of helping you sleep, but this one does. The post’s genesis is in the seeming deluge of articles on driver safety over the past few weeks. Driver safety is an extremely important topic with the focus here being on driving for work … Read More
