Occupational health specialists within the HSE are aghast at its plan to reduce ill-health prevention even further, saying it totally contradicts the regulator’s erstwhile message that health matters.
Speaking exclusively to SHP in advance of research on the dearth of occupational-health expertise at the HSE presented at the TUC Congress in Brighton yesterday (9 September), a senior OH specialist inspector slammed the proposal in the current consultation on amending RIDDOR 1995 to remove the reporting requirement for cases of occupational disease.
The regulator is proposing the change because of overall “extremely low” levels of reporting of occupational diseases, and because information is usually “incomplete” or “received too late to act as a reliable trigger for an investigation”.
The specialist inspector said: “We OH practitioners within the HSE have been saying for some time that the RIDDOR requirements need to be updated but not abolished! The HSE policy division is saying that this information is not reported properly, and that we just use it to gather statistics, but that is not true – this information is vital for us. You don’t abolish the speed limit just because the majority of people don’t adhere to it!”
The inspector added that delays have not been helped by the loss of resources like the HSE’s Infoline (which was shut down last year), and gave the example of a “simple, easy-to-answer” query that eventually came through to the right person seven weeks after it was first made and had “gone all around the houses”.
At the TUC Congress the Prospect union, which represents 1600 specialist staff in the HSE and Office for Nuclear Regulation, revealed that there are just three occupational physicians left in the HSE, and 18 OH inspectors – down from 60 of each in the early 1990s.
The union’s head of research, Sue Ferns, told delegates: “Cuts are occurring just as the Government proposes to emasculate employers’ obligation to report occupational-health absences from diseases such as mesothelioma, skin cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, and repetitive strain injury under RIDDOR.
“That would remove the bulk of the intelligence guiding the work of hygiene and occupational-health inspectors, and deprive lay health and safety representatives of information essential for them to monitor workplace health.”
According to data obtained by Prospect:€
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
