Posted By John Fraser Gavin In my experience, health and safety is more appreciated in the Private Sector than Public Sector.i.e More Buy in from operations in the private sector / better attitude than public sector when one is administrating h & s advice. Operations have a poor appreciation of health and safety in the public sector in my view, making h & s person's job a lot harder to convince them to change their ways. Good Luck in your interview. John

Posted By Karen Jackson Hi Gavin, I worked as a H & S Manager in the Construction industry for 8 years. I changed to the ALMO of our local council in Aug08. Massive differences: Changed to be part of a team; Team restructures and lack of funding in this financial year have meant that I am left with a trainee and a part time admin to cover 1000 employees, 20K properties,Tech Services, Elderly Services, Occ Health etc etc. Lack of funding; you can identify issues until you are blue in the face, but they will only deal with critical issues due to lack of funding. UNIONS; everything has to go for consultation, you cant just agree a policy and go ahead. I find our unions particularly obstructive instead of working together - however I am working on this. Meetings; too many. Councils have meetings to discuss meetings - when do you get the work done? After saying all this, the work is interesting and diverse if somewhat frustrating at times. If you like real hands-on? when most of the works to properties is refurbishment and go out to site expecting a full estate being tackled to find two properties scaffolded and 2 men working!!!! By the way did I mention the training? You will probably be expected to create and deliver all the health and safety training as well! Good Luck, I would go back to construction tomorrow.

Posted By Guderian2 Worked for the NHS for a while - awful! As stated by others, a thankless task providing a h&s service in the public sector. Too much union consultation - meetings about meetings, policy documents doing endless rounds of consultation before being accepted etc etc Would only ever consider working again in the public sector if very desperate for a job.