In a general sense, under the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 (HSWA) you are responsible for the health, safety and welfare of all employees as far as is reasonably practicable.
That’s all well and good but what are the first steps in achieving this? Well, it all starts with making some initial appointments, making sure key H&S roles are accounted for in your business.
Sometimes it may be you as the business owner fulfilling a role, other times an employee. You can also engage with external specialists like us to support you and ensure you are doing everything correctly. Let’s take a look at three of the most fundamental roles.
Appointing a competent person
As an employer, you have a legal responsibility to appoint a competent person (or people) to conform to health and safety laws and regulations. Whilst this competent person doesn’t need formal qualifications, they should be equipped with the skills, knowledge and experience to recognise the hazards in your business. They need to be able to identify the controls needed to protect workers and others from accident or injury.
The competent person you appoint can be yourself, an employee, or an outside agency. For many SMEs the financial implications of employing a competent health and safety person makes it unfeasible. In situations such as this, or perhaps if it’s a complex health and safety issue for your business, you can hire an external company such as The Health & Safety Dept to handle your health and safety needs.
First Aider
Legally you have a duty to ensure that your employees have help straight away if they are injured or taken ill whilst at work. In order to fulfil this duty you must:
- Have an appropriately stocked first aid kit.
- Appoint a person or people to take charge of first aid arrangements.
- Provide information for all employees telling them about first aid arrangements.
Having a trained first aider is even better and in some cases essential. Here at The Health & Safety Dept we can provide the first aid training needed to ensure you have a person or people within your business trained to do so. Our first aid courses range between one to three days in length depending on their focus.
We also are able to provide eLearning courses which will support your first aid employees, including:
- Accident reporting training
- First aid appointed person
- First aid requirements and RIDDOR training
- Spill kit training: bodily fluids
- Infection prevention and control training
Fire Marshal
Employers in the UK legally have to appoint a responsible person for fire safety, also known as a fire marshal. The fire marshal must have special training so that they can effectively manage their fire safety responsibilities.
The responsibilities of this role include identifying fire hazards, putting fire safety measures in place and coordinating the response if a fire does occur. We can support your business with this as we offer eLearning courses to enable your responsible person to be a competent fire marshal or warden. We also offer fire awareness training, which is suitable for all staff.
Next steps
Whatever your needs are when it comes to health and safety, we are on hand to support and train your workers to ensure that you are meeting the legal requirements to keep your workers safe.
Whether you would like to use us as outsourced health and safety for your ‘competent person’, or if you need support for those existing employees with a health and safety role, we are here to help. From risk assessments to policies, in-person training to eLearning courses, contact us today to get started.
