Health and Safety Concepts – Proactive Health and Safety

Proactive Health and Safety – what do we mean? With respect to health and safety, are you Proactive or are you Reactive? Do you wait for things to happen and then respond? Is so, you are reactive. Most of us do a mixture of the two. We react to certain things and we try to stop others from happening (by being proactive). In the field of health and safety, reporting an accident would be reactive, as would providing first aid and investigating an accident. In this sense, we are reacting to something that has gone wrong. No business wants to be well rehearsed in dealing with (health and safety) failings or in giving refunds for poor quality service or products.

What do we mean by Proactive Health and Safety?

So what is proactive? Well, carrying out a risk assessment is proactive. After all, we are trying to work out what can go wrong and take steps to stop it happening. In this context, proactive is better than reactive. So what sort of things are proactive? Here is a list to get you thinking:

• Carrying out Risk Assessments
• Checking that the fire alarm system is working
• Setting up service and maintenance contracts for equipment
• Checking that standards (such as lighting, cleanliness, use of PPE) are being adhered to
• Checking that contractors are competent to do the work that you are asking them to do

Proactive Health and Safety (and Swiss cheese)

When I deliver training, I talk a lot about control measures (things to keep people safe). I then go on to talk about these as defences or “barriers to harm/loss”. Some barriers are poor at preventing harm because they are “full of holes”, often because nobody checks on them. Proactive checking  quality and integrity of the “Barriers” is a way to help ensure that the holes in the barriers are not too numerous and not too large. In the model that I use, this means that we are reducing the likelihood of failure. The holes in the “Barriers” give rise to the Swiss Cheese Model purported by Prof James Reason.

My message to you

Tend to the holes in your Swiss Cheese. Don’t wait for things to go wrong and then react, be proactive and ensure that things don’t go wrong. Safety has been described as a “dynamic non-event”. This means that you have to work hard to ensure that nothing happens (i.e. that nothing goes wrong).