Health and Safety Inspections
The legal responsibility for managing risks created by your work activities rests with you.
Effectively Managing health and safety in your organisation will help you to:
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Reduce the costs of death, injury and ill health;
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Meet your moral obligation to protect people’s Health and Safety;
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Stay in business- accidents and ill health cost money and could ultimately put you out of business;
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Meet your legal duty.
We assess how you manage risk to your employees and others who may be affected by what you do.
To carry this out effectively we will concentrate on areas where we know there are deaths, injury and illness, at work, the priority topics. We also expect you to have identified and taken action on other risks, which are created by your work activities.
Priority Topics
Around 75 people a year are killed and more than 5,100 are seriously injured due to falls from height. They are the most common cause of workplace fatalities and second most common cause of major injuries. The main cause of all injuries is falling from ladders.
About 70 people a year are killed in workplace transport accidents and there are around 1500 major injuries. Workplace transport is the second biggest cause of fatal accidents.
Approximately 1.1 million people in Britain suffer from work-related musculoskeletal disorders, around half of which affect the back. An estimated 12.3 million working days per year are lost. Sufferers take an estimated 19.4 days off work per year.
The most common cause of non-fatal major injuries to employees is a slip, trip or fall on the same level – accounting for over a third of all such injuries reported to HSE and local authorities.
The most recent survey 2004/5 revealed that in Britain 12.8 million working days are lost each year due to work-related stress.
Concentrating on these priority topics we are looking to achieve the governments target by 2010 to reduce:
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Number of working days lost due to ill health by 30%;
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The incidence of ill health by 20%;
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The incidence of accidents by 10%.