When did you last review your Health and Safety Plan?

A Health and Safety Plan is important for any business and setting up a plan is crucial (and legally required). How long has it been since your plan was set up? Many things have changed in the past few years, so it’s probably time to review your plan. It will also give you the opportunity to remind your staff about the plan as the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 requires businesses to have a high degree of engagement with staff (both employees and contractors) about health and safety.

Regardless of whether you have three staff members or three hundred, here’s three tips when reviewing your plan.

Assess new and current risks

When you set up your plan you identified the risks at that time. Are those risks still current? What new risks do you have? Discuss with your team the potential risks and hazards that might face your business including social aspects such as bullying, stress, and burnout. They’re as important as physical risks and having a plan in place can help identify what more you can do to mitigate the risk.

Tweak your plan

Once you’ve assessed risks and hazards, you’ll need to update your health and safety plan with the procedures to mitigate those risks. Consider how to adopt new procedures and focus on how those procedures are actionable and practical. You might need to update staff training, lists of first-aid equipment and first-aid qualified staff, amend the induction process for incoming staff, and policies on workplace health and safety that employees commit to. You might also want to review the reporting process for notifiable events to WorkSafe.

Put your plan into action (and share it with your staff)

Once you’re reviewed your plan, don’t let it gather dust, share it. Implement it as soon as possible and make time to make sure everyone knows the new/updated processes and any new risks or hazards the review identified. You might need to run regular courses or drills to help keep everyone up to date. It’s a good idea to encourage staff to raise any new risks and hazards – think about how you can make that process easy.

If you work in a hazardous sector or industry, you can set targets to measure the impact of your plan. For example, targets for keeping workplace injuries low, or to prevent sick days and burnout.

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