Assignment NO 3
Subject: Occupational health and safety
Submit To: MR Amir Manzur Wain
Submit BY: Muqadar Karamat
Roll-Number: F19-1080
Semester: Seven
Discuss three different workplace health issues and how
employers are responding to them?
Occupational health issues in the workplace
Anything which causes risk or hazard to an employee—physical or
mentally—is an occupational health issue. There are many occupational
health and safety challenges and issues faced by employers. Stress,
sickness and unsafe working practices all contribute to absence, illness
and injury.
What’s the problem?
Today, the world of work is more diverse than ever and it’s continuously
changing. Unfortunately, change can have negative effects as well as
benefits, and often presents us with a new set of problems and risks to deal
with. This transformation of the workplace and the way we work has led to
new types of occupational hazard. In recent years, workplace health issues
in particular have attracted greater attention. This is unsurprising – if we’re
unable to work because of health problems, we’re affected socially and
financially. Though we don’t know the exact economic cost of absence and
worklessness caused by sickness in the UK, it’s thought to be greater than
the current annual budget for the National Health Service.
Common health and safety issues
Your workplace will have its unique challenges to overcome, but there are
health and safety issues familiar to every business, small or large:
Temperature, light and air conditioning
Harmful surroundings and hazardous substances, like asbestos
Workstation health and safety, like computers and other display
screen equipment (DSE)
Manual handling
Noise and sound exposure
Slips, trips and falls
Handling heavy machinery, tools and equipment
Three different workplace health issues and how employers are responding to
them?
#1 A high rate of work-related injuries
Self-reported, non-fatal workplace injuries reached 441,000 in 2020/21.
Certain accidents are familiar to every workplace, whether your staff operate a
crane, or sit at a desk for most of the day.
Here are the most common dangers in the workplace, according to the HSE.
Common injuries and the percentage of accidents reported across all industries:
Slips, trips and falls on one level: 33%
Handling, lifting or carrying: 18%
Struck by a moving object: 10%
Violence: 8%
Fall from a height: 8%
Your health and safety objectives should focus on eliminating the most common
workplace injuries.
The IOSH Managing Safely is an entry-level course for anyone that works in a
high-risk environment.
If you want to build a strong health and safety culture within your teams and
show them how to spot a common hazard a mile off, IOSH Managing Safely is the
right course for your business.
With the training, your team will:
Constantly assess the function and size of a space, plus how many people
are using it
Schedule inspections but stay alert for hazards at all times
Know how to assign a score to a hazard and describe the likelihood and
severity of an accident if no action was taken
Apply hazard and risk controls, plus communicate when it officially needs to
be reviewed so the hazard won’t put anyone at risk in the future.
#2 There are life-threatening risks at work
You must submit a RIDDOR report if a member of your staff gets injured and they:
Die
Break a bone, except thumbs, fingers and toes
Need amputation
Lose their sight
Suffer a crush injury to the head or torso with damage to the brain and
internal organs
Sustain a serious burn that covers more than 10% of the body, or damages
the eyes, respiratory system and internal organs
Lose consciousness after a head injury or asphyxia
Need resuscitation
Get hypothermia
As there are significantly fewer employer-reported injuries versus employee-
reported injuries, we can take that as a good sign – businesses are managing to
control health and safety risks.
However, you must make sure that accidents are correctly recorded.
You must report an injury at work if it causes your employee to take more than
seven consecutive days of sick leave.
If your employee’s injured, but it doesn’t fall into a RIDDOR report category, you
must still make a record of it. You must keep an accident book under the Social
Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations, 1979.
If you follow health and safety legislation carefully, you’ll sidestep legal action and
compensation claims, assuring the future of your business and the wellbeing of
your staff.
Quality health and safety training, like the IOSH Managing Safely or NEBOSH
General Certificate will show you how to safely handle accidents and control
hazards, however dangerous they are.
There will be an increased number of accidents in the workplace following any
kind of health and safety training, but it’s a positive trend. It shows the learning
has transferred and that your staff are accurately reporting the accidents, hazards
and risks they encounter, which were uncontrolled before the training.
#3 You work with harmful substances
The HSE estimates there will be 2,500 mesotheliomas (cancer) deaths every year
until the end of the decade, linked to exposure to harmful substances at work.
It’s not hopeless – if you work with harmful substances and fumes, you can take
steps to protect your staff.
Health and safety training that contains risk assessment training (both IOSH and
NEBOSH do), will show your staff how to reasonably predict foreseeable risks, like
occupational asthma, lung disease and mesothelioma.
All good health and safety training courses will walk through risk controls that can
be dropped into working environments to safeguard against harmful substances
that could cause respiratory conditions:
Is there physical signage alerting staff to the substance and instructing
them how to behave?
Are health and safety procedures placed on the surfaces around the
substance?
What equipment and machinery could be used to reduce the risk?
Is there a less hazardous substance which could be swapped in?
Could engineering solutions be employed to contain fumes?
Are staff wearing enough protective clothing? For example, masks, goggles,
gloves, and hazmat suits
Identifying opportunities to outsource to a specialist is another outcome of
successful health and safety training. For instance, which chemicals and pollutants
could be very harmful to your staff.
