Posted By Richard
David

Don't be too sure that big companies will have H&S on their intranet. I cover six sites, within a 7 mile radius, and have been trying for three years to get some H&S input to our intranet, even for simple things like on-line accident reporting (I thought of it before HSE did!), but to no avail

Richard

Posted By Mark A. Bush
Like Richard, it took me years to get an intranet site. Now we have one.

We have 11,000 employees across 74 sites. All employees have access to our intranet site which contains risk assessments, policies, procedures and safe systems of work.

We have had on line reporting for 3 years and are just about to post statistical data to the site for local management to use.

If you are a small user and want an off-the-shelf web based system, try somebody like EQE in Warrington (www.eqe.co.uk).

Feel free to contact me and I will share my experiences. tel 0121 626 5000 extn 2540.

Mark

Posted By Mark Preston
I've answered David (in more detail) directly, but I thought I'd add my experience here too - it's a subject for which I've some enthusiasm...

I asked a related question on this forum some time ago - most of my respondents were university safety advisers and many are members of the University Safety Association.

There are links and addresses for many of its members (and their sites) here:
http://www.kingston.ac.uk/hasweb/members.htm

I've found that many university safety intranets are partly or wholly accessible on the internet. Generally, academic sites have been doing this for longer than most of us.

Here at Oxford City Council we have moved our safety management system onto the intranet.

Migrating from paper to the web took one person with no prior experience of web authoring less than four weeks working 3-4 hours a day (it was August, a quiet month for safety in local government) - most of the content and the underlying structure was already there in our integrated Safety management system (now THAT took time and effort to produce).

The financial savings, immediacy of update, ability to link, search features etc made this well worth the effort.

We loaded the authoring software (Macromedia Dreamweaver/Fireworks Studio) at the beginning of the month and had the site up and running (served initially from one of our own personal computers) before the thirty day trial expired.

Here's an example of the advantages of the safety service controlling the means of production...

Back in September we were asked for safety guidance for a home/teleworking pilot - the following day after three hours work (and thanks to the homeworking guidance on this site), an at-a-glance guide, manager's action plan - all linked to other relevant guidance on electricity, dse, puwer, ergonomics, lone working, stress etc. - together with an assessment form were up on the site and available for all.

This generated a request for more detailed guidance on frequency of test and inspection of portable electrical equipment - a couple of days later this was up too.

If managers/employees or safety reps identify problems with your guidance/forms etc or have useful suggestions to make you can make changes to the site in no time at all - and this gives a tremendous boost to their feeling of involvement in the safety management process.