How capable of understanding the MSDS are the personnel at point of use? Most are written by technicians for technicians and for transport safety, not the safety and health of end-users. An alternative approach would be to have clear and prominent instructions for safe use, first aid etc for those substances that are most hazardous, at the point where harm may occur.

Hi I produced a sheet with the common chemicals used giving brief details on the chemicals we use i.e. name, type of hazard, PPE needed and spillage measures. I then laminated this and stuck it around the place. My issue was not so much access to the MSDS but an awareness that most people would not bother to consult them anyway. It is much easier for people to glance at the sheet on the wall which tells the 'wear gloves' of something similar. We only deal with fairly low risk products which are often used in a domestic setting with no precautions.

Guru. I think I agree with Stuff. MSDS have all necessary info in them but it can be hard to interpret if your not used to reading & understanding them. So I would only have one set accessable to all. If the auditor is trying to say that PPE and spill information should be available at the place of work then I would implement a local site system to group and list which materials require what PPE. i.e. Nothing,or LEP and simple gloves, or LEP & dust mask & gloves. or .... Like a lot of Cos we introduced 4 levels of PPE and then allocated each material into one of those PPE catagories. best wishes Peter

My apologies if I have missed something here, but I would expect to find multiple copies of the Control Measures formed as result of your COSHH assessment at different locations, along with appropriate evidence that you have communicated these measures to your employees. I would only use the MSDS as a starting point in COSHH assessments and as others have already said they can be difficult for the untrained to interpret for different work environments.

We have made all of our MSDS's available on a central database that everyone in the company can access from their PC. When staff want to look at a particular one they just click the icon and the whole database in alphabetical order comes up and they can go straight to the specific chemical they are looking for. They can also print any of them off and keep a copy for themselves if they would like. We used to have multiple folders in multiple locations but found it very hard to keep them all up to date with new revisions and if anyone removed an individual MSDS we would not know immediately.

Thanks everyone for your valued input, I think the auditor was being very picky with this one. The MSDS's are going to be kept in one central location, but I think its not a bad idea to have a laminated poster at each location, where chemicals are handled, explaining they types of chemicals used in that area. It can spell out what it means, and what to do when theres contact or spillage etc. I dont see any value in having multiple locations of MSDS's, it will get confusing, hard to control, and will end up some going missing which I dont want. COSHH assessments have been done, with appropriate controls, and everything is included in the staff training, so we are ok with that. I quite like the idea of having the documents scanned and have them on a central database, so they potentially could be accessed from any PC, which we may look at. As it turned out, the audit went well :)

Hi, Just to be pedantic don't MSDS come under REACH now, some minor changes I'm told but I haven't really checked it out, see: http://www.hse.gov.uk/reach/resources/reachsds.pdf regards Steve