Posted By Ron Young I've just been promoted from Health & Safety Manager to Group Safety Manager. There is also a Group Health Manager who looks after the Occ Health part of the equation. Whats in a name, the jobs the same! I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that the only reason our profession was called Health & Safety in the beginning was the Kudos that the Health profession had in society and in an attempt at aligning Safety amongst the elite we used it to raise our profile. The story went on to say thats the reason why Health came before Safety in the name. Can anyone remember this or am I getting as senile as Geoff Burt?

Posted By Ron Young Shouldn't that be "insufferable"?

Posted By Geoff Burt Yes, you're right Ron, please accept my apologies for calling you unsufferable when it should have been insufferable. See, you live and learn!

Posted By Hilary Charlton We tend to go even further and our committee is the Environmental, Health and Safety Committee - how does one separate environmental issues such as radiation, clean water, air emissions, waste products, etc from health and safety? There has to be some degree of overlap. Let us not forget however, that s2 calls for us to ensure so far as is reasonably practicable the health, safety and welfare of all staff but we cannot go round calling ourselves the health and safety and welfare committee so we shorten it to safety committee or safety officer - it fits better on slogans and badges apart from anything else. I guess at the end of the day it's all semantics. Hilary

Posted By Gilly Margrave The reason a Safety Committee is called a Safety Committee not a Health & Safety Committee is because the Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regs call them that. You will probably find most Trades Unions use the term to make a distinction between a properly constituted committee jointly owned by employers and unions and various other purely management activities.

Posted By Merv Newman I'm as guilty as anyone here. I talk about Safety, and sometimes have to explain that it is just a shorthand for Safety Health and Environnement. A little bit of history - which will probably bore the pants offf most of you, but I like it, so there. I used to be one of the european "safety" consultants for Du Pont (sorry, sorry). As related to me, in about 1910 - 1920, Du pont introduced a "Fire Protection (FP)" advisory service for it's (then) US plants. When I joined Du Pont in the sixties, this had recently become Safety and Fire Protection (S&FP). When in 1976 I became Safety manager in Du Pont (UK) Ltd, this had become Safety and Occupational Health (S&OH) Somewhere in the eighties, we became SHEA - Safety, Health and Environmental Affairs. (no significant pay rise at the time) However, I still think of myself as a safety man, as that is my principal responsibility - accident (ofany sort)prevention - and I really do think (this will upset a LOT of you) that health and environment are just subsets of our basic brief - Protect our fellow man in the most cost-efficient way possible (and lobby for bigger payrises for all our fellow professionals) Anyway, (this will upset the rest of you) health and environment are SO much easier to handle than safety. Discuss Merv Newman