Unfortnantly that i sht eway of the NHS, the emphysis is more on risk than Health & Safety. the H&S advisor here is also the non clinical risk advisor, and is moving to become a clinical and non clinical risk advisor. they are looking at a consultant for 2 days a week!!! its about cost savings now.

And from my little archive “There was a written policy on health and safety, which as a matter of drafting was a thing of… some beauty. If it had existed beyond its existence on paper, it would have very substantially mitigated the blameworthiness of those representing the Borough” Mr Justice Burnton - judge in the case against Barrow Borough Council following the deaths of seven people (2006)

saf I think it's blindly obvious from press and external reports that some parts of the NHS are in meltdown. That said, I suspect other large publicly funded bodies are in a similar situation where the management of health and safety is exceptionally poor. The strange thing is that if these monoliths were a privately funded organisations the regulators would be flexing their muscles by taking legal action against those companies and possibly some individuals within them. It seems to me that there is a standard which is is deemed tolerable for public bodies which would not be so for privately funded ones.

Research on organisational cultures supports the modus operandi that appears to support Ray's view. At one phase of my evolution as a safety practitioner, I was asked for assistance in relation to a young and a mid-life female psychiatrist in two different NHS hospitals. The request in relation to the young one came through the BMA; it was to prepare a report as an expert witness after she had been held at knifepoint in an room in Outpatients' Department, nine months after a report from inspectors to the Chief Executive of the leading teaching hospital who employed her stated that the room should not be used until 4 relatively inexpensive structural changes were made to the room. The young lady was unable to work again as a psychiatrist after the incident and it took her four years to get a financial settlement at figure less than the annual salary of a psychiatric consultant. From memory, nobody was nominated as the person responsible for safety management before the incident; after it, over 100 'man-hours' of committee time was spent talking about the incident and avoided making any decision to do anything different to prevent a recurrence. The request in relation to the mid-life psychiatrist came to me in a personal phonecall after she had been threatened with a machete outside her office one morning and cancelled her list of appointments for the rest of the day. I drafted a memo which she sent to the CEO the next day. When she had no reply a month later she successfully applied for an appointment in another hospital where she's been quite successful and free from risk of unauthorised execution. A junior HR person did speak to her about her memo to the CEO shortly before she left the hospital which evidently regarded a physical threat to the life of an expensive member of medical staff as routine. James Reason has set out the conditions which permit this to happen in the reference already given - and he has had considerable impact on critical settings - operating theatres - in hospitals across the UK and RoI. By contrast, mimimal formal legal controls of the kind that saf is preoccupied with are unlikely to have much relevance in this uncivilised state of affairs.

Do not tar all of the NHS with same brush. I have worked in the NHS, it is very complex organisation with generally two sides of the house being clinical and non clinical however H&S applys to both sides of the house. Like many large organistions good practice /bad practice can be variable. H&S managers in the NHS would have support from Local Security Management Specialists, Patient Safety Lead, Clinical Audit, Infection Control and a Back care Team etc. The example given is of one hospital / Trust and on the statements posted I would agree there appears to be some weakness in the overall H&S management arrangements but I would hope the picture painted is not taken as generally the case across the NHS.