Hello I have been asked to take over & chair the quarterly H&S committee meeting in my company Apart from informing the attendees about the below I don't really have anything else to add as we are a low risk environment and nothing much has happened over the last 3-4 months 1. statistics on accident records, ill health, sickness absence 2. accident investigations and subsequent action 3. changes in the workplace affecting the health, safety and welfare of employees. What other topics can I discuss? Thank you

Why dont you look at changes and details on: First Aid/Fire warden arrangements, fire drills/evacuations, risk assessments, site inspections, your accidents and stats, HSE campaigns or ideas, legislative changes (provide them a summary/your interpretation), access problems to site, any HSE seminars/events etc...........

What about any cases/incident/prosecutions in competitors or other similar industries/fields that you operate in? Or any new ideas or initiatives to motivate people to continue with the low incidence rate?

THANK YOU to all of you, this is good stuff. You have made my first posting a successful one :-)

As well as the suggestions above, I'd suggest a "No Surprises" rule at the meeting: Anyone raising a safety problem at the meeting should be prepared to answer the question "and what have you done about it so far?". You'll get a few where the issue only cropped up that morning, but even then they should be able to say "I've reported it to my manager, don't know what's happened since". At my last job, when I took over H&S meetings would go on for ages, mainly caused by the department safety rep's reports consisting largely of a long list of problems they'd spotted and saved for the meeting to report. It took us a long time to get the "No Surprises" rule working - even though it obviously got things sorted quicker to report them as soon as they were spotted. If you've got a chance to implement "No Surprises" from day one, you might have a much easier time (and more worthwhile meetings) than we did!

Chris.Packham - It is the finance industry - typical office environment

As Stephenclarke says above this HS Meetings should be lead by a Senior Line Manager. The manager chairing the meeting needs the authority to commit resources to the points raised, the meeting otherwise will frustrate everyone and undermine the HS Management of the business. The HS Advisors role is supportative and advisory. Lenihan, sell the above to the the manager that gave you the job in the first place, provide him with the agenda, provide all the support materials, and you are on to a winner. Steve

To have a good and useful H&S Committee you need: 1. An Agenda-stick to it- avoid Any Other Business-don’t have surprises 2. To get the papers out early so every one is briefed and understand what is being discussed. 3. Have short informal pre-meeting meetings with Trades Unions and others, to clear up trivialities before the main meeting. The main meeting should be for strategic review not local problem solving. 4. Use it to publish information incident stats and the like, get in reports from the Occupational Adviser but don’t let anyone hi-jack the meeting keep it to the point. 5. Get actions agreed and share them out around the people in the meeting, don’t dump it all onto the H&S team! 6. Time-The meeting should not go on longer than two hours. After that the brain slowly dies and it becomes pointless. I have been attending H&S Committees for ten years now man and boy, and there is nothing worse than going through the motions for 5 or 6 hours and thinking to your self” I’ll never have that time back”.