Every business needs to have a health and safety plan in place. It can be difficult to maintain health and safety within the workplace. This article will help everyone within the business maintain health and safety management efficiently. This will be through various steps including....

• the core elements of managing for health and safety
• deciding if you are doing what you need to do
• delivering effective arrangements
• useful resources

Maintaining health and safety is usually split into four stages. Plan, Do, Check, Act. These stages will help keep everything on track so that no wrong turns happen. There will be many requirements within each stage. Further details will be linked throughout.

Plan

In this section, you'll need to figure out where you currently stand and where you want to end up in your health and safety journey. You can do this by listing your aims, how you'll measure these aims and who will be in charge of these aims. The plan will need updating so plan for changes whether that's due to circumstances or legal requirements. Plan for every hazard and potential risk it may entail. For example, plan how you'll deal with a wet floor to prevent someone from slipping.

Do

After planning is done to an efficient level, it's time to start implementing the plan. However, this should be covered in the risk assessment and also in the method statement. Identifying and analysing the hazards and prioritising the higher risks will be key in managing safety.

Check

It is important to keep checking on how your business maintains its health and safety. As mentioned previously things will change overtime so it's essential to keep things updated and checked. Checking how well the hazard in question has been controlled will also help you with deciding if you've reached your aims effectively. If any accidents, incidents or near misses are to have happened; it's best to investigate them and note the reasons behind them here.

Act

Act may at first seem like it should be the same as do but it isn't. Act is where you review everything that has been done in the previous stages. If things need changing or something has gone wrong in the process, here's where you'll revisit the plans and take action from the lessons learned from the mistakes made. Was the right training in place? Was there sufficient first aid for the job? All questions that could be considered. Inspection reports will also help decipher what actions need to be done.

It's important to note that these stages will come as a cycle. Your business will keep going through this cycle, especially when starting out, developing new processes and implementing changes. Finally, whatever is done, it's vital that everything your business does to maintain H&S standards follows legal standards and makes sure that the welfare of its workers is the best it can be. Failure to do so could lead to consequences that could be severe for your business.