What Your Company Needs In Terms of Health and Safety

Every company needs to have health and safety. This is how you are going to keep yourself and your employees safe and ensure that you know what to do in the event of things going wrong. If you don’t have these policies, procedures and preparations in place and something does happen, then you could put lives at risk and be liable for legal claims. With that in mind, here are three things that every company needs for their health and safety.

Risk Assessments

Risk assessments are the things that look into what could go wrong and what you are going to do in that eventuality. For example, if you work from an office then you will want a fire risk assessment. This looks into what sorts of things might cause a fire or be a risk in the event of a fire. Things like if you have an elevator, then you will need to make sure that everyone knows not to use it in the event of a fire and that there are alternative ways out of the building. You will also need to assess any potential fire risks such as space heaters and make sure that their risk is minimised. All of this will be catalogued in a document for everyone to read and be aware of. Your risk assessments will need to be updated at least every year or if there any major changes.

First Aid

Almost every company will need some kind of first aid box. You should also have a member of staff who has been trained in first aid with an up to date certificate. This way if something does happen and somebody does get injured or hurt, then you have a person who is trained to take care of them. Your first aid box needs to include things like bandages, band aids and other things that you would normally find in a first aid kit. You will also need to check yearly that none of the items have gone out of date and replace any that have. Your first aid box should be easily accessible by anyone in the office and make sure that new members of staff know where to find it.

Policies

Your company’s policies are where you are going to detail all of your health and safety related things. This might be whether the building is safe to work from, what the procedure is in the event of fire such as where do you meet and where the fire exits are. It will also include any company wide policies and policies that are specific to certain areas. For example, if you leave the office for meetings or have to travel to the bank with money, then each of these needs to have a policy or section in a policy. These all need to be available for everyone to read and understand. This might be in paper form or digital on a computer. All of these will need to be updated at least every year or when something major changes.