I'm considering how best to bridge the gap in a large Organisation between the Procurement Officer and the person in the Organisation who needs to procure the goods and services. This would exclude construction and major contract provision and facilities maintenance issues (the experts handle these things!), and be more limited to work equipment and goods, consumables and services of a more general nature. There are a number of apsects where guidance is required, including PUWER, Machinery Directive, essential safety requirments and CE marking Directives, COSHH, second-hand and donated goods and equipment. I can't and have no intention of making these people experts, but I need them to know enough to recognise that there are things they need to do and that there are health and safety responsibilities which are not transferred via contract. My Big Ask of the Forum then, has anyone already produced such a concise document addressing some or all of these issues that they'd be willing to share? I may have things to trade!

Ron Appreciative of how thoughtfully you approach safety management, may I suggest that you view the matter as a social process rather than a technical one. For 'the gap in a large Organisation between the Procurement Officer and the person in the Organisation who needs to procure the goods and services' has many parallels with roles in 'HR/Personnel' where complex volumes of legal and technical data are passed around and updated at regular intervals. What you call 'the gap' is expressed technically in ergonomic language as a cogntive interface and in social psychology as differnt levels of analysis and communication. There are many 'concise' documents that approach the matter as a social process, which is a valid description as an alternative to the cybernetic task of simply transferring information without attention to how different people invariably interpret the same information differently. Two reasonably 'concise' documents that indicate how to approach your task from very contrasting standpoints are: 'Soft Systems Methodology', by P Checkland, John Wiley & Sons, 1984 and 'The New Psychology of Leadership', by S A Haslam, Psychology Press, 2011 (actually published 3 months ago). This is a state of the art guide to social psychology based on the social identity of any individual such as a Procurement Officer and other persons who need to procure goods and services. If you need practical help translating either approaches into the organisation you wish to influence, you can get in touch with me offline.

Ron - good morning. I have sent you a PM. Rich