Occupational Health and Safety in the Workplace

Safety in the workplace is critical to the success of your business, no matter what size it is. As a small business owner you have responsibilities regarding health and safety in your workplace. Even if you don’t have any employees, you must ensure that your business doesn’t create health and safety problems for your customers and the general public.

Knowing and understanding the Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) laws will help you avoid the unnecessary costs and damage to your business caused by workplace injury and illness.

Under OH&S legislation you are obliged to provide:

• - safe premises
• - safe machinery and materials
• - safe systems of work
• - information, instruction, training and supervision
• - a suitable working environment and facilities.

If you don't comply with these legal requirements you can be prosecuted and fined.

One of the most important aspects of Occupational Health & Safety management is to have records to provide evidence of what you do to ensure a safe working environment. Having a log of all training provided to staff, no matter how small, can be invaluable if you need prove that your staff have been trained. This does not have to be complicated, it can just be a notebook with the heading of the training, brief explanation of the contents, where it was held, when was it held and who attended. Even better if you can get a signature from those attending to prove they attended.

Another area where documentation would be invaluable is risk assessment. Have a systematic approach to determining risk and putting into place measures to reduce or manage the risk. This should be done constantly.

Firstly you should do an assessment of your premises to determine if any risks exist and if they do, how they are being managed. It is important to do a brief assessment of the severity of the risk and the likelihood it would happen. For example ask yourself if the risk will require minor first aid or could it be potentially fatal. Then ask what is the likelihood that this would happen at all levels. First aid required may be likely and often, whereas fatal death may be extremely rare and not likely to happen.

Make a record of these risks and assess all of them as far as what can be done to reduce risk. In some cases putting a caustion label or sign may be enough, in others it may require training and restrictions to only some staff which are competent to operate the specific machinery.

It is your business, so keept it safe and keep it real. Each time something changes in your workplace, do a routine risk assessment of the changes to ensure that no new risks have been caused due to the change.

Safety is not hard, just common sense