It appears today that just about everything comes under the heading of ‘Health & Safety’, and this is being reflected in recent job adverts which ask for Health, Safety & Environment, Health, Safety & Quality, Health, Safety & Cleaning etc, etc, etc. I was reminded of this recently when it fell upon me to review our Company No Smoking Policy, and it set me thinking.

How much of our current remits are strictly Health & Safety. For example the Smoking Legislation was not introduced under Section 15 of the HASAWA, is not a European Directive on Health & Safety in the workplace, and is not enforced by the HSE. Likewise DDA and the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order (please correct me if my understanding of this is wrong).

And yet I am constantly contacted with enquiries about Fire (even though we have a Fire Safety Officer) and DDA. Yes I appreciate that there are Health & Safety considerations in respect of these subjects, but as I said at the beginning of my post so does everything else. Believe me I have staff reporting that someone looked at them ‘funny’ on the way into work on the bus so they have reported this under Health & Safety??????

I would be interested in others view, positive, negative or just down right rude.

Fire "Safety" - surely there is a link?

I thought DDA was brought in under the H&S umbrella? If not why do we H&S professionals bother with DDA assessments?

The observation 'It appears today that just about everything comes under the heading of ‘Health & Safety’, could be said by almost every 'staff' adviser who doesn't have direct 'line' responsibilities.

On the specific issue of disability discrimination, the relevant DDA legislation makes it clear that, in principle, health and safety takes precedence; in practice, an employer and service provider are required to gather evidence to justify decisions about discriminating on an empirical and not emotional, political or tradition grounds.

More broadly, the challenge facing safety professionals like HR and other specialists is to influence and educate line and senior managment into integrating safe behaviour across every activitiy of their enterprise day and night, 24/7/365. This can at times require quite sophisticated consulting skillls - practitioners such as Tim Marsh illustrate them well in articles in SHP.

One of the great tragedies I witness at times is safety 'wannabe' professionals repeatedly cutting the ground from under their own feet by trying to use safety audit data and regualtions to harass line managers: they pick fights or push past line managers instead of figuring out effective ways of negotiating common ground and influencing the management agenda, at all levels. Whereas line managers recognise when the safety specialist is simply intent on completing a logbook to get a qualification and are not persuaded to go out of their way to someone who appears to put personal interests first, whereas those practitioners who make it clear they'll support managers and operatives to get results safely achieve common goals.

Hi
Agree with KieranD about how we should get managers to do things properly. We are then always going to be seen as people who can help especially as we are often the main person in an organisation seen as being a legal type person and hence understands ,sometimes mistakenly, all different types of law. Historically safety people where the ones who helped the disabled worker to do a job safely - look at cases like Paris v Stepney Borough Council. Lots of the techniques we use are readily interchangeable with other disciplines and people often recognise this.
I do sometimes wonder though as to how people cope with all the different disciplines when they are an actual part of the job.
John C

Health and Safety is my main role, but over the years I have collected Security, Environment, Quality Systems roles as well. In my case I see no problem, they share many skills, knowledge and competency requirements and I have more strings to my bow.

However I do draw the line when people try to take advantage of H&S to further their own agenda (usually when they want me to deal with a problem for them, or stop something from happening - they can be very inventive in trying to 'make it a H&S issue') It makes me maaaad!

Hi John,

Now look what you've done - I've had to risk assess climbing onto my soapbox, with my bad back at that!

I probably should have made it clearer that I have been an access auditor for a number of years now, and have had to help in implemeting the DDA for a several clients. I wholeheartedly agree that the remit of the DDA is broad and that the implementation will rest with a number of people (HR, Legal, Management, etc.). Equally, however, I believe we are and should be included in that list - if only to ensure that any reasonable adjustments proposed do not cause problems for other users/occupiers/visitors (evac chairs and manual handling spring to mind amongst other things).

Re-reading the original post and subsequent comments, I would say that the underlying issue is that the remit of 'health and safety' is no longer clear cut and I can also see this evolving further over time. As a few other contributors have said, health and safety can be linked to from pretty much all parts of any business making multi-disciplinary professionals an advantage. However, the caveat is and always will be competence and knowing your limits.

Cheers,

J

Bob,

Believe me I fully understand the impications of DDA; during the run up to the full implementation of the Act I was part of this Charity's HR directorate, and I was involved in all the discussion and preparation we had to do. This is why I say it isn't H&S; it's HR. Yes, there are H&S implications (see my earler post); there are H&S implications in the way operational management works, but that doesn't make H&S responsible for operations,

John

In fairness to Bob, it is his opinion and he may not have any objective evidence. I think we are in danger of getting bogged down here and straying too far from the original thread. I fully appreciate the ramifications of DDA and other similar types of legislation, even though I do not as rule get too involved with them. I leave that to designers and human factor specialists. However, I also appreciate that some others in health and safety might deal with DDA on a frequent basis.

Work involving asbestos is health and safety but I don't touch it because I am not insured for that area, so I dont give advice when asked.

If someone asks me about health issues, again, if I'm not sure I recommend they seek out an occupational health practitioner.

Smoking - that's simple legislation that shouldn't be difficult to manage, the effects from smoking cigarettes can be harmful to health, health is part of "health and safety" so it's included.

Just because we operate in health and safety it doesn't mean we all know everything.

I do fire risk assessments, I also do DDA assessments because I can. Health and safety is a vast area and I doubt if there is any one person that knows it all.