Managing health and safety is an integral part of good management. Our Policies and guidance set out our arrangements for managing health and safety. If you have management responsibilities, please read the USHA and HSE guidelines below to understand your responsibilities.
See: Summary of Responsibilities for a summary of your health and safety responsibilities.
The impact of changes brought about by by strategic plans or specific projects on the health and safety of employees and students need to be considered as part of planning processes. The Health and Safety team should be consulted in good time on projects and plans that will have a significant health and safety impact, so that timely advice can be given.
Areas for consideration include:
Plans should also address the need to:
All employees need to be competent to meet their responsibilities and carry out their work safely in accordance wit the health and safety standards related to their work. Health and safety also needs to be incorporated into student training. Employees and students require appropriate supervision, to ensure they are carrying out tasks safely.
Those with management responsibilites need to be aware of relevant health and safety lesiglation and how to manage health, safety and wellbeing in accordance with our policies and standards.
All employees need to be able to work in a safe and healthy manner. New starters need an induction into health and safety procedures relating to their role.
Heads of Department/ School are responsible for ensuring employees and students are inducted on health andsafety and receive appropriate information, instruction and training.
For information on Training see:
Risk assessments help us to identify how people can be harmed from our work, study and organised leisure activities and what needs to be in place to protect employees, students and other users of our premises from harm. The law requires employers to carry out ‘suitable and sufficient’ risk assessments. Heads of Department/School are responsible for ensuring risk assessments are undertaken and kept up to date. The task of carrying out risk assessments may be delegated to a competent member of the team.
Monitoring helps us to ensure our health and safety policies and risk assessment findings have been implemented and are adequately protecting people from harm.
Heads of Department / School should ensure that regular health and safety inspections are undertaken. In higher risk areas regular safety tours or daily walk around may also need to take place to ensure the physical environment is safe.
Reporting and investigating incidents help us to learn why someone has been harmed and so put into place measures to prevent it happening again. We also monitor trends or patterns in incidents to identify areas where further risk controls may be needed. Please ensure that your team know how to report incidents
Health and Safety Audits involve collecting information about the health and safety management system and making judgements about its adequacy and performance. It is a proactive method to monitor whether risk controls and processes put in place to manage health and safety across the University are adequate and effective in practice, or whether improvements could be made. The Health and Safety team carry out a regular programme of audits. Heads of School / Department are responsible for ensuring audit actions are addressed in the agreed timescale. Senior managers should monitor this.