Health & Safety - An Inspector Calls

Being mindful of what your face is doing is about the most difficult part of an audit or an inspection (which are two very different things by the way and I will get into that in a different blog post).

The person charged with walking around with you is usually the person who ends up sorting out the issues so they watch you like a hawk! And I can't blame them, my beloved profession has a bad rep as we have already discussed and it's they who will be explaining to the holders of the purse strings why this is a necessary spend, so I understand it.

From my perspective, and as any fellow practitioner will attest, we are used to walking around and seeing these things, for us it's a thing that we can not turn off, restaurants, supermarkets, holidays - all the poor practice is there before us and we are used to coming up with ways to keep ourselves and others safe. It's part of our language. By the way we love it when someone blames health and safety for a thing to be closed or off limits - the mind boggles! So when we see poor safety practice number 15 of the day we may pull a face and especially if that is concentrated in the same area as a number of other poor or unsafe practices. For me its leads me to wonder why something would be done that way, I never want to just say you can't do that, I want to know why you do that and then talk about if there is a better way to do that that won't, or is less likely to result in an injury. Is that going to cost you money as a business, yes honestly sometimes it does, but it also saves you money from sick pay, cover pay, negligence pay out, production time loss, maybe even reputational loss depending on how big it could be.

It can be a little bit " Stand by your beds" when I turn up and that is not going to help you or me, you think you are hiding things that then I won't pick up, but I am there to pick things up and help you find a way to do it better and eventually that stuff under the rug will cause an expensive trip hazard. When I say no where is perfect I mean nowhere is perfect! Health and safety isn't about lecturing, making anyone feel bad. It is simply about your health and your safety.