Challenges facing health and safety

1. Keeping up with regulation changes

The need to legally comply with health and safety requirements is increasing in a lot of countries to promote safer working environments. Keeping up with these changes can be difficult for companies, especially in labor-intensive industries like construction, agriculture, and manufacturing.

Join industry associations or local groups to help you keep in the loop with changes to your obligations, and make sure to be on any mailing lists that directly report these changes.

2. Organisational health and safety training

A common challenge in health and safety is getting the organisation on board with proper practices, often at the cost of their own personal safety at work. To encourage a safer working environment, a training plan is crucial so your organisation can adopt proper health and safety practices.

Here is a quick guide on how you can create an effective health and safety training plan for your organisation:

• Identify training needs and objectives: Who needs the training, and what is the desired result from the training?
• Design your training method: How will you teach your team to achieve your objectives? Where possible practical hands-on learning with a live demo is best, but other options are simulating actual conditions or working through scenarios.
• Carry out your training: After you have designed a training method, the next step is to carry out your training with your team. After the training is completed, your team should be able to demonstrate that they have the health and safety skills necessary to safely carry out the activities.

Another aspect of effective organisation health and safety training is creating a culture that emphasises the importance of personal safety. Create and share a safety vision with your team, impose accountability, lead by example, and hold regular health and safety meetings to ensure your organisation takes health and safety seriously.

3. Leveraging technology for health and safety

Technology has greatly developed over the past few years, and while this does present new health and safety risks, it also provides plenty of opportunities to leverage technology for effective health and safety.

One way technology can be leveraged is with virtual training, some industries even use virtual reality headsets to simulate working environments and scenarios to effectively train new workers on how to carry out their work in a safe manner.

Improved reporting capabilities can also be used for health and safety to identify patterns in workplace injuries and forecast potential risks or threats to assist with workplace injury prevention.

The paperless workflow also helps health and safety by streamlining a lot of health and safety processes like completing risk assessment forms, incident reporting, and other routine activities.