The main focus of the August SafetyNet best practice group was the new regulations on smoke and CO alarms which will come into force on 1st October (see separate post). We also discussed the following issues with members:

• How to make the whole arena of health and safety more dynamic – moving away from a plethora of dry policies and procedures which staff don’t engage with, to a single health and safety statement and policy
• How we empower individual managers to take responsibility for health and safety issues, to embed it as everyone’s responsibility across an organisation
• Moving to an intelligent, needs-based approach to health and safety training rather than a “sheep-dip” approach – based on dynamic, gap analysis and assessment – while recognising the mandatory and legal training requirements for certain trades/ roles
• Dealing with non-attendance at mandatory training including penalising team budgets, understanding the reasons why people don’t attend, making part of individual and team KPIs and holding managers to account
• Encouraging trades to actively use lone working devices. Most have changed the terminology away from “lone working” to personal protection/ safety devices. Positive examples of positive uses and how it can support workers can help people to use devices better
• Working in heat (following on from the recent heat wave in UK)
• Moving out of a siloed approach to health and safety – especially with asset management teams. A good example give was the artificial separation of “people safety” and “building safety” – in reality skills and competence are similar for both – risk assessment, compliance, data integrity, engagement with colleagues/ residents.

Our next best practice group will be held virtually on 15th November. I do hope you can join us there. If you have any burning issues you would like to discuss with other members – please do get in touch via the SafetyNet WhatsApp Group or via the website.