By Paula Corrigan, health and safety manager, Plus Dane

In June, we were delighted to be awarded our fifth consecutive RoSPA gold award in five years.

We’re a small team of three, serving some 600 colleagues across a diverse range of working environments, and so to be able to demonstrate our commitment to health and safety excellence by securing this award is something we’re very proud of.

Over the last year we’ve worked hard to raise the visibility of health and safety in the workplace in a wide variety of ways and have found the key to this has been meaningful engagement with teams across the business, who understand what we need to achieve and have reacted positively to incorporate changes into their routine.

The ROSPA award application process is robust and based on answering a set number of questions by providing in-depth evidence of how we’ve met health and safety obligations throughout the organisation – so it’s certainly not just a box-ticking exercise. My colleague Rachel does a fantastic job collecting this evidence throughout the year, logging every campaign, staff communication, risk assessment, audit, minutes and much more that give concrete proof of actions taken and outcomes.

This applies to everything from day-to-day life in the office or homeworking, our repairs and environmental teams working in our neighbourhoods and colleagues visiting customers’ homes, to public events like community days and clean-ups.

We’ve recently completed a health and safety cultural survey to help the team understand the culture at Plus Dane and establish any trends in workplace accidents and near misses to help identify areas to focus on.

We relaunched health and safety at the beginning of the year throughout the business by introducing a new intranet page and slogan – KISS: Keep It Safe and Sound. This is initially focusing on accident and near-miss reporting, and making health and safety as a whole more visible throughout the business.

We introduced a QR code displayed on air fresheners to simplify reporting accidents/near misses for our trades colleagues, which has had been a big positive this year.

In line with our new intranet page, we’ve introduced a monthly health and safety bulletin, a schedule of ‘toolbox talks’ to keep trades colleagues informed, and accident investigation workshops which ensure the team are regularly engaging with colleagues and that health and safety is a top priority throughout the business.

We recently ran a campaign providing an update of our revised lone worker procedure, educating colleagues of the importance of using lone working devices and in turn increasing their usage.

Housing involves a wide range of areas of work, each with very different risks and needs, and we’ve completed a piece of work on risks assessments, changing them from task-specific to trade/team-specific documents. The team identified risks from a health and safety perspective and engaged with individual teams through working groups, and these are now recorded on One Source, where everyone can access and review.

Staff engagement really is key to making sure we get to see the bigger picture of workplace health and safety at Plus Dane – from having representation on our board with an allocated ‘champion’ to making sure we’re actively working with teams across the business to make sure nothing is overlooked.

We’re proud that our achievements have continued to meet RoSPA’s gold standard and will work towards keeping up these standards in future.