Posted By cara
Can anyone give me a definitive answer to this question please?

Why and how does health and safety inform planning and decision-making?

Posted By Chris Jerman
Ron, a brave and concise attempt. A huge question indeed.

In addition to Ron's comments I would suggest that people have to start (if not already) to integrate safety and health into business management. I know it sounds obvious, but we shouldn't be managing safety, 'they' should be managing safely. The role of the safety professional should be to make themselves redundant. In other words, to take the company to the point where a specialist isn't needed anymore. Managers must understand their businesses - totally, not just in part. Safety related to them in terms of 'money' is playing their game. Telling them that there have been 0.0145 incidents per 100 000 hours blah blah means NOTHING to them. If we show them that 150 customer deliveries were affected by lack of handling equipment or that MH injuries cost us £190k = to 2% of turnover last year has a profound effect.
The broader term Risk Management reflects ALL of the threats to the business, where cost and benefit must be assessed 'holistically' not in isolation. If, when good analysis is performed, safety issues do not rank highly enough to be on the top agenda, them we have to get real and look at what can be done with less. Merely saying that because it's safety therefore it IS important does not engender managers. Portraying yourself as a manager first and a technical specialist second opens far more doors. Safety after all is just another part of loss prevention and efficiency.

A good question to which there are many more answers, I'm sure. But we have to question why almost 40 years after Robens, what are we really doing that's any different. Given that we are still asking ourselves this sort of question I would suggest that what we are doing may not be quite right. It's up to us.

Chris Jerman
CFIOSH

Posted By Ron Hunter
No worries Chris - no offence taken.

Posted By TomP
HSG65 should give most of the answers and goes in to this in some detail. Hardly concise however but it deals with at decision making in the context of the bigger picture.

I would suggest annual review drives business and as health and safety is just another risk to be managed a thorough review of active and reactive monitoring results, audit results, industry drivers against commercial objectives should all feed in. This should guide the decisions of directors, managers etc. and commit resources, objectives etc.

Posted By Kieran J Duignan
In answer to:

'why?': to contribute to business excellence, profitability and growth, through leadership in managing risks of all kinds

'how?': answering attentively to responses to intelligent questions from people at all levels to senior managers