Health and Safety is everyones Responsibility

It is that time, the season of goodwill to all, but spare a thought for the families who have lost loved ones, this will be a very hard time of year for those families.

GMP as a Police family have suffered tremendously with the loss of colleagues in tragic circumstances, unprecedented and difficult to accept.

These officers will never be forgotten and live on in our memories, for all our colleagues who will be working over the festive period stay safe and a massive thank you to you all.

 

There have been acts of bravery and tremendous work done by officers throughout the country, we saw the Olympics and Para Olympics take place, from a Policing angle (no thanks to G4S) and Health & Safety it was a success.

 

 

As we move on into a New Year let’s hope that we see no repeat of bad events of 2012, this includes the Governments total lack of respect for the Police service, you reap what you sow.

 

 

Back to the day to day life of health & safety

 

“Near Miss Forms”.

 

Okay I know the first question from most of you will be “What’s a near miss?” Well it could be lots of things, but in Health & Safety terms it is defined as;

 

“ANY ACCIDENT THAT HAD THE POTENTIAL TO CAUSE HARM, BUT THE HARM WAS NOT ACTUALLY REALISED”.

 

Some of you will now be thinking what’s the point in reporting something that hasn’t caused any injury and the answer to that is fairly simple?

 

When we are unfortunate enough to have accidents or receive injuries at work we all report them to our line managers, who fill in a Form 700b, the reason we do this is to firstly comply various requirements placed on us by pieces of legislation such as the RIDDOR Regulations (Reporting of Injury Disease or Dangerous Occurrence Regulations), the second part of reporting accidents and injuries is to identify the circumstances or places where accidents occur to see if they can be reduced. The force does this by continually monitoring the information we provide, and by carrying out audits to see if the goals they set out to achieve in the force Health & Safety Policy are being reached.

 

So for instance you may have fallen over an uneven piece of paving in the rear yard and suffered cuts and bruising, you have reported it to your supervision, and they in turn have completed the 700b and sent it off to the various people that need a copy, so the force is well aware of your accident.

 

But what the force or your division did not know was that several other people had also fallen or tripped in the same place on the same bit of uneven ground and received no injury what so ever and therefore made no report to anyone. Because of this, no trend was established during the forces or divisions monitoring or auditing process. So as far as everyone knew the yard was in perfect condition because no one had ever fallen over receiving an injury, and no one had suffered a “NEAR MISS”.

 

Now if those several other people had put “NEAR MISS” forms in to the division the un even rear yard should have been identified during monitoring as an accident waiting to happen and could have been repaired, which hopefully would have stopped you falling over and suffering your cuts & bruises.

 

Now I know we are all inundated with paper work, but most of that relates to our prisoners (I know I should have called them customers but they were prisoners when I joined and they will always will be) the near miss form is for our benefit so please take a few moments to fill one in if you are unfortunate enough to suffer a near miss.