Every year we sit down with our Health and safety consultants and review our position. This is a full and detailed health and safety audit.
Questions arise:
- Are we doing all we can to work safe?
- Are we keeping up with changes in health and safety legislation?
- Where have we failed and why?
- What must we do to improve our health and safety performance?
Of course we ask ourselves these sorts of things all year round. But having an outside consultant come along and grill us helps focus the mind and can reveal flaws, bad-habits or omissions, which may otherwise remain.
This past week we’ve had the pleasure of Paul Kent’s company. He is a senior consultant with Stallard Kane Associates; one of the UK’s leading health and safety support providers. Paul knows our business well and he’s watched our health and safety performance improve for many years.
So when he tells us we are doing great work it’s a real comfort and an encouraging sign. However, our work is never done; lots of health and safety legislation mentions ‘as low as reasonably practicable’, which results in constant review of our practices. In effect what may have been suitable last year may be unsuitable now. Work methods and practices evolve all of the time and so must we. We call this ‘Safe by Design’.
Safe by Design
One example of safe by design is from our damp proofing activities. This involves the increasing use of specialist dry-lining systems like Safeguard’s Drybase Flex and the Safeguard plastering system. These offer reduced exposure to dust during application, noise and vibration too. So when these are technically appropriate we can reduce potential harm to employees and others by using them, instead of labour intensive and onerous traditional methods. Less heavy materials to transport and lug about the building, less waste and better ergonomics in use – a no brainer. The cavity wall tie work we are famous for has also benefited from constant re-design. We use only specially designed tools with reduced vibration at source. This is great for our technicians long term health
Our employees know they are well cared for, but clients too can be assured that from survey and design stage we plan to work safe – for everyone’s benefit.
Sincere thanks go to Paul Kent who gave us great advice and ideas for additional improvements this year – thanks Paul.
Here’s some of our sites web pages you may find useful and interesting:
How we protect homes from rainwater with Stormdry
Wall Tie corrosion – how we repair it and guarantee the results
A case study about how we successfully treat woodworm
