What Does A Health And Safety Officer Do In The Workplace?

Sep 1, 2021

When you grow your business, there are certain additions you must make to your workforce and the overall structure of your business. Every reasonably sized business should have a health and safety officer to ensure that your organisation is compliant with health and safety policies and procedures, as well as fire safety legislation and fire prevention.

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Here we will look at what a health and safety officer does and how you can get the correct training for your organisation.

Responsibilities

Health and safety officers have many day-to-day duties. They must work to ensure that preventable accidents do not occur and that the chances of injuries and illnesses at work are lessened by carrying out risk assessments. Every UK workplace must keep high health and safety standards to minimise risks in the workplace, and it is the officer’s role to both create and keep the policies and procedures up to date.

As well as this, they must make sure that these policies are followed by all employees.

Compliance

Another element of the health and safety officer’s role is ensuring that their company is compliant with the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974. This outlines the regulations that all companies must comply with to make every UK workplace as safe as possible. They must also keep the business compliant with the Regulatory Reform Fire Safety Order 2005, as part of the company’s standard health and safety policy.

Employees

Employees also have a role to play in risk management. The officer must ensure that they are able to comply with policies and procedures by fully explaining what these are to all new and existing hires. They will also need to regularly check up to see that the employees are following these.

In most cases, this will involve providing training on health and safety to new employees and refreshing this training year on year so that they remember every element of it and can remain compliant.

Training

Providing the correct, up to date training to employees is a job in and of itself. One of the simplest ways to provide this is by bringing in a third party who has expertise in health and safety, as well as compliance. Safety Aide provides online training for employees in health and safety, fire safety, and more, giving them the tools they need to remain safe in the workplace. Get in touch with us to find out how we can best help you with all your health and safety needs.

 

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