Sector: Communications and media

A new resource for employers to help promote workplace dialogue about musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) has been published by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA). 

 IOSH and award-winning content marketing and publishing agency Redactive today announced a new partnership to provide news, updates, insight, careers advice and job opportunities for safety and health’s largest professional community.

Three specialists outline five key lessons that OSH professionals can consider in their work.

Proposals aimed at reducing the number of British people who lose their jobs because of disabilities and ill health provide an opportunity that must be “vigorously seized”, the professional body for workplace health and safety professionals said today.

The safety and health rules businesses impose on each other – often referred to as “blue tape” – combined with inconsistent, sometimes incompetent advice threaten to discredit sensible regulation and good guidance and practice.

The All-party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Working at Height has urged the government to take forward the recommendations in its report after the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) latest statistics showed an increase in the number of fatal injuries caused by a fall from height.

Practitioners and investor representatives gathered in Paris to examine how safety and health fits into corporate social responsibility. 

Inspectors will focus on issues including machinery, falls from height, child safety and risk posed by livestock. In October and November 2018, the HSE ran a series of agriculture compliance events in South West and Eastern England, Wales and Scotland, which focused on the practical steps that farms can take to ensure compliance ahead of the inspection visits. The events were developed as a result of research into farmers' attitudes to risk and were aimed at changing industry behaviours.

The guidance is part of an entrapment reduction campaign launched by the Strategic Forum for Health and Safety in the Mineral Products Sector.LOTOTO builds on the “lock-out, tag-out” procedure, which ensures that power sources are isolated before maintenance work can start. It includes an additional step that requires operators to test the controls before they can complete their tasks.

Biffa’s kerbside waste and recycling collection teams routinely run the gauntlet of impatient car drivers mounting pavements beside them at speed to manoeuvre around the parked refuse vehicles.The national recycling and waste management contractor took a while to grasp the scale of the hazard because crews seldom reported these near-misses.“The difficulty is getting the workers to accept there is a problem; they are so used to it,” says Dave West, Biffa’s regional health and safety coach.