In the second article in his series for SHP, Jim Struthers explains how we should be accentuating the differences between health and safety in order to successfully change people’s attitudes to health and safety processes.
Since the inception of the Health and Safety at Work Act in 1974, there has been a successful drive to bring a responsible attitude towards fundamental health and safety processes to both employers and employees. As a result we now look on health and safety warnings and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as normal, realistic practices that save lives. But is it entirely accurate to assume that health and safety is a marriage of equals?
It is common for safety to come to the fore of statistics because the effects are immediate and more instantly measureable; for example, a gas leak can cause asphyxiation and ultimately death.
Essentially the visibility of injuries as a result of safety failings can make it easier for these to have an impact on attitudes and behaviour in the workplace – an employee who has witnessed a colleague suffer a head injury as a result of falling scaffolding is more likely to remember this incident and think twice when deciding to wear protective headgear. The effects of safety are predominantly short term.
However, it is far harder to understand the impact of health failings when a majority of these result from an ‘invisible killer’. In the construction industry alone, 3,500 occupational cancer deaths every year are as a result of exposure to hazardous substances that are formed from everyday construction tasks, including solder and colophony fumes, stainless steel welding fumes and woodwork dusts.
The ‘invisible’ nature of the health message has resulted in the need for strong campaigns such as the BOHS Breathe Freely coverage which has seen success as a result of spokespeople such as Simon Clark who, as a former electrician is now suffering from mesothelioma, having been exposed to asbestos over 30 years ago at work.
According to the HSE statistics from 2014/15, 1.2 million working people suffered from a work-related illness while 611,000 injuries occurred at work according to the Labour Force Survey.
The impacts of health hazards are predominantly shown in long term latency effects, such as the particulates breathed in over a number of years by employees in the coal mining industry or the prevalence of asbestos in older buildings. Each of these can and do lead to chronic illnesses over many years and subsequent death.
The prevalence of safety signs on construction sites are a constant reminder that on entering a site, employees must be wearing PPE including a safety helmet, protective footwear and high visibility vests.
However, it is less common to encounter ingrained health awareness in the same scenarios that suggest to employees they should be wearing equipment to monitor their exposure to dust levels, fumes or other respiratory hazards on a regular basis.
In order to combat ‘invisible killers’, health must benefit from a similar targeted awareness programme to safety that is aimed at the unique impacts of long latency health concerns so that neither health nor safety result in avoidable deaths.
ISO 45001 was expected to be published in October this year as the new global health and safety standard designed to improve work environments and reduce workplace deaths. It has been delayed potentially until June 2017. This will raise awareness towards occupational health and long term exposure effects to dust and noise. We hope that businesses will soon recognise the need for effective monitoring solutions and realise that they really do save lives.
Without regular monitoring of employee exposure, it is far harder to demonstrate that there have been improvements in combatting health hazards. By introducing regular monitoring, health risks can be afforded the same attention and respect as safety but in a way that recognises the difference in long and short term latency impacts to the benefit of employee welfare.
Jim’s first article in this series looked at united worker responsibility and how critical it is for the future of health and safety.
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Excellent piece, Jim, thanks!
I read this just after seeing coverage of the report on air pollution in cities and the allegation that the government ‘prioritises road safety over the health effects of vehicle-generated pollution’. It seems there is always risk of compromise on committing resources (expertise, budget, effort) when it comes both sides of H&S, not only in companies, but even on a macro level.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37213786
In my time working in health and safety in a corporate environment and now in consulting, I see companies struggling with how to apportion effort and budget between safety and health. One manager told me that he only concentrated on safety because deaths and injuries from industrial incidents are impossible to ignore. What he didn’t say – and what everyone in the room was thinking – was that the consequence of this attitude effectively results in industrial and psycho-social health being sidelined or ignored.
Being brutal, if a company wants to increase productivity, then concentrating only on ‘health at work’ – rather than safety – will prevent people being off work for weeks, months or years with complex conditions or illnesses, some of which are never cured. However, recovery times following all but the most severe safety incidents tends to be counted in days or weeks – not months or years. The HSE data for 2013/14 shows: 23.3 million days were lost due to work-related ill health and 4.1 million due to workplace injury.
Companies that don’t own or run high-hazard operations or those with without inherent and well-understood chemical or particulate exposure risks, need help in assessing risks (and benefits – thanks ISO 45001) and in having a holistic approach to H AND S.
But for some, a comprehensive approach to both sides of the H&S equation is ‘kicked into the long grass’, because it’s too difficult, too resource-intensive and/or they fear the legal consequences of admitting to the potential for employee ill-health issues. For these companies, this policy will not just be a problem for the workers who fall ill from work-related conditions in the future, but it’ll be a problem for the company legal departments having to defend possible multi-party actions by employees or their families against their employer for failing to discharge their duty of care. Tricky times. If a boss knows about a health risk and gets the company to do something, that’s surely better than knowing about something and not doing anything.
Shareholders should – and ultimately – will be holding companies to account on BOTH health and safety because employee well-being is closely linked to productivity and healthy, sustainable growth and dividends. It’s not all doom and gloom – there is a win, win, win in here somewhere!