Okay… So we have legislation. We also have regulations and to top it all off we have accepted codes of practice (ACOPs). There are so many points of reference on what we need to do to keep ourselves and our employees safe whilst on the job, do we really need a health and safety management system? Now before we get all preachy, let’s explore what a health and safety system actually is.

Well, we all know what health is and I’m guessing the concept of safety is well understood… So what is a system?

System (sɪstəm): “A set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole.”(ya gotta love Google!)

Now we’ve cleared that up, putting it all together we can infer that a health and safety system takes constituent parts, and orders them to ensure they are all interconnected and working together as part of whole, to ensure health and safety is managed.

Contrary to popular opinion, a health and safety management system does not prevent injuries; it does not guarantee an injury free environment. Your health and safety system merely postpones the inevitable. Now, I know this sounds dark and defeatist and probably a tad demoralizing, but I am hoping this becomes your motivational mantra. Every day we do nothing to improve risk controls, identify areas of weakness, increase our knowledge of our working environment, is one day closer to the inevitable… “Day X”. The day it all goes wrong.

Your system should be constantly evolving and adapting to accommodate for the ever changing landscape we call the workplace. Each day you apply your system and make improvements to it, pushes Day X out a little further. Some of your actions have a significant impact, pushing it out a little further than others. But, once you stop… once you sit back and relax your efforts, happy in the knowledge that you have your health and safety management system just the way you want it and are convinced it can get no better…you begin to shorten the timeline between where you are now and the dreaded Day X.

This is why every health and safety system worth having, or every health and safety standard worth striving for contains not only the fundamentals of hazard and risk assessment, incident management and investigation, competency management etc. etc. etc. You must also have an element of “Continuous Improvement”.

Continuous improvement should become the driving force of your system whether you are pursuing certification to one of a number of standards out there, or not. Your data collection and analysis activities should be accurate and meaningful. They should allow you to set objectives, self-evaluate and improve your position with regards to health and safety performance. Too often, we pay lip service to these activities merely to satisfy some element of a certification standard. We have been so focussed on compliance for so long that we’ve forgotten what the whole process is actually about. If we are continuously improving, we are continuously delaying Day X.

If you would like to have a discussion about your Health and Safety Management Systems and the benefits of working with Hadrian Solutions, contact us today!