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Hopefully the answer to the final bit of that question is ‘not yet’ but there will come a time when that point will be reached but how we are to determine when it arrives is perhaps another whole article in itself.
Humans have failings, they get tired, they get bored, they forget things or they get distracted and that is when things go wrong. So, here is another potential feed into the slowing down of accident improvement and yet so many people seem to think that once trained a person no longer acts simple as a person but as a trained machine in some cases. People are people so treat them as such.
WHERE TO NOW AND INTO THE FUTURE
It may be that the various health & safety organisations lack of response to the questions sent out to them was not just that they do not like to think that the flattening statistics show a decline in the effectiveness of the current H&S programmes or some failing on their part. It might also be that they too have seen what is happening and as yet have not really come up with a positive option or any answers as to how to make things improve into the future and they do not want to talk about the possibilities until they themselves have researched various avenues and come up with an effective plan. It might however be that some form of response now would have helped to trigger the discussions that will undoubtedly needed to be entered into and started the flow of ideas that will be the foundation on which new forms of H&S programmes may have to be based.
It must be remembered that it is not just the H&S aspects of any changes that will need to be addressed, there is the response of the workforce also. Whilst many will see the advantages of any proposed changes, there are those that will see it as an opportunity to ‘improve the lot’ – usually financially – of their workforce, so it can become very complicated and cumbersome to make any useful and timely changes to working practices, training and qualification requirements to makes the stats move in the right direction once again.
It may be that the past few years of levelling off is simply a sign of the financial difficulties of the past 8 years. In the next year or so we may see the stats start their downward trend again. It is quite possible of course that the whole change in the
8 drain TRADER | December 2016 |
www.draintraderltd.com
H&S stats fortunes is down to a combination of more than one if not all of the aspects discussed above and maybe even some that have not been included or even thought of as this is being written.
So, what can be done to change this flattening trend and even what should be done, bearing mind that there are limited resources everywhere at the moment and once finances improve there will be a wish to hold on to better profits rather than fund additional layers of what most would probably see simply as bureaucracy?
From the viewpoint outside of the system, it does seem to be somewhat odd that simply training someone and then letting them loose on the world is common practice based on a somewhat doubtful understanding that they will put into practice in the workplace all they have learned and passed exams for without failing somewhere.
The assumption that in the financially tight world we live in the numbers of supervisors is sufficient to ensure that good practice is pursued at all times, when managers are often now one man/woman doing the jobs that used to covered by three also seems a little optimistic to say the least. The current legislation/bureaucratic requirements precludes that as quite often the paperwork (even electronic/computer-based paperwork) often keeps these managers in the office when in fact they would serve the H&S practice better out on site. Should there be more effort to minimise the bureaucratic
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