The scope and nature of occupational health and safety

We examine the broad nature of the occupational health and safety practitioners’ role, before moving on to define some of the key subjects in the field - safety, health and welfare.

In this first lecture of our walkthrough the NEBOSH NGC1 ‘Management of Health and Safety’ module we examine the broad nature of the occupational health and safety practitioners’ role, before moving on to define some of the key subjects in the field - safety, health and welfare.

Multi-disciplinary Role

The role of the health and safety practitioner is broad, challenging and complex, it can feel a very thankless task at times, yet at other times incredibly rewarding. As a result, an effective health and safety practitioner is a very versatile creature with much variety in their role.

Key tasks in the health and safety role might include:

• Writing policies and procedures
• Assessing risks
• Investigating accidents
• Advising managers and directors
• Consulting with employees
• Training
• Managing Contractors
• Liaising with third parties including auditors, regulators and insurers

To be able to complete all these functions properly health and safety practitioners need a broad range of transferrable skills, they need to be able to:

• Communicate effectively
• Maintain their independence
• Work at all levels of the organisations they work within
• Organise their workload
• Prioritise
• Delegate
• Maintain their own competence.

It is very rare these days that the health and safety function in an organisation sit in isolation. Other roles often combined with the Health and safety function include:

• Environmental Management
• Quality Management
• Security
• Training
• Food Safety
• Transport

leading to the creation of the HSEQ Manager, HSET Manager, QHSE Manager, SHEQ Manager, HSE & Compliance Manager and so on - all dependent upon the priorities of the organisations they work for. The point being that every health and safety role is different, (and very often every day is different too!) and that health and safety professionals often need to adapt and upskill to accept other requirements in to their role.

It should also be noted that occupational health and safety covers a broad range of more specialist areas, which we will touch on in more detail later on. While the general health and safety practitioner does not need to know everything about these specialisms, they do need an overview and broad understanding of what they are and their application. Such specialisms include:

• occupational health which is primarily concerned with monitoring individuals for the onset of disease and ill-health arising from exposure to hazards

• occupational hygiene, primarily concerned with examining and controlling individual exposure to dangerous substances that can cause ill-health.

• ergonomics, which is a field concerned with ensuring that the work process is designed to be aligned to the individual and thereby reducing the likelihood of human error.

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Barriers to Good Standards of Health and Safety

Complexity

We have already seen that the health and safety profession is one that has broad boundaries, is challenging and has a range of specialist areas within it. Health and safety professionals are usually generalists who need to know a broad subject area in great depth, but who also cannot be expected to know everything about a field as complex as ergonomics for instance. This poses one of the great challenges for health and safety professionals - knowing the limits of our competence, and when to seek expert support.

Sometimes the measures that need to be implemented can be complex too, which can result in items lading in the too difficult pile. An organisation might identify the need to implement improvements to the traffic movements on their site - but the wholesale rearrangement of the site may make this too big or complex a project to realise expediently.

Finally, that level of complexity can make it difficult for others to understand why something that seems obtrusive is necessary and to implement it properly. An example might be the correct use of extraction for welding processes, the equipment is bulky, and heavy, and can be perceived as getting in the way - explaining that the fume it is extracting might contain substances like nickel that can cause skin and lung conditions in the future, can seem a bit of a stretch to those with little understanding of occupational hygiene. It is almost always easier to convince people of the need to take measures to protect their safety, with hazards that are often visual and obvious, than it is their health.

Competing and conflicting demands,

Health and safety do not sit in isolation in an organisation, and therefore it is subject to the same challenges that other disciplines face.

Production is almost always king in a production environment. That poses a number of challenges:

Short cuts, bypassing safety measures Releasing employees for training Releasing safety representatives to fulfil their duties Often health and safety improvement programmes will come with a capital costs that competes with other functions for the finite resources that the organisation has at its disposal, and arguably conflicts with the organisation’s short-term desire for profit.

Time can be problematic too. It is rare for health and safety to stand in isolation within an organisation. The modern health and safety professional will often have competing demands from their other responsibilities including environmental and quality management and more generally surviving the audit hamster wheel. Time is also an issue finite for everybody else in an organisation.

All of this should be put into context when designing solutions to health and safety problems - systems that are disproportionately costly, complex and unwieldly are unlikely to succeed for this reason.

Behavioural issues

Even the best designed and resourced health and safety management systems still require people to implement them. While this should not pose a problem for organisations with strong health and safety cultures, compliance will be more problematic where the culture is less strong.

Common reasons for disregarding health and safety systems include:

• perceived inefficiency
• peer pressure
• custom and practice elsewhere in the organisation
• top management set a contradictory example
• misperception of level of risk
• overfamiliarity with process / equipment
• lack of training
• lack of supervision and reinforcement

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Key Definitions

We conclude this introduction to health and safety management by defining some of the underpinning terms in the health and safety profession - health, safety, and welfare. When we move on to look at the requirements of health and safety law later on in this course we will see that employers are required to take measures to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees - what do these words mean, and how do they interact with and differ from one another?

Health

When as health and safety professionals we talk about health we are usually talking about keeping employees are others free from ill-health or disease. Usually we are concerned with exposure to chemical, biological and psychosocial factors that can make people unwell. This is in contrast to safety which is usually concerned with exposure to physical hazards that cause physical injury.

One of the mistake health and safety professionals tend to make is not paying adequate attention to occupational health. In part this is due to latency - often ill-health following exposure can cause many months or years to manifest, exposure to asbestos for instance can take 40 years or more to result in mesothelioma. Health hazards can be more difficult to see and identify too.

Safety

When talking about safety, occupational health and safety professionals are usually talking about keeping employees and others free from physical injury. Unlike health hazards safety hazards are usually very immediate, often apparent, and are also often easier to explain the significance to others such as managers, directors and employees. It is often easier to convince an employer that they need to provide a guard to a piece of machinery, than it is to convince them that they need to better control exposure to substances such as wood dust for instance.

Notwithstanding any of the above it should be noted that significantly more people are killed in the UK each year through historic exposure to dangerous substances than are killed in an accident at work.

Welfare

When we talk about welfare, we are usually talking about the provision of facilities in the workplace for employees. We might be referring to the provision of toilet and washing facilities, of first aid facilities, of places to eat and drink. We might also be talking about maintaining the environment in the workplace at comfortable temperatures.

While welfare is about provision of facilities and a comfortable working environment, it should be noted that welfare has the ability to impact on both safety and health. Employees that cannot wash their hands properly before eating, for instance, are more likely to ingest the dangerous substance that they work with and suffer ill health. Employees who are too hot or cold, or with poor lighting are more likely to have accidents in the workplace, impacting on safety.

Summary

In this first lesson of our walkthrough of the NEBOSH NGC1 ‘Management of Health and Safety’ module we looked at the complexity of the modern health and safety professional’s role, along with some of the other disciplines it tends to come with. We also looked at some of the barriers to achieving good health and safety management. We concluded by looking at definitions of some of the defining terms in the health and safety field - health, safety and welfare.