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May/June 2023 issue

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IOSH 2017: Day 2

Open-access content Tuesday 21st November 2017
From the archive:  Just so you know, this article is more than 3 years old.

IOSH Conference 2017, Day 2. Tanni Grey-Thompson address

IOSH Conference 2017. Day 2 Lawrence Waterman address

Thompson said she only missed five daily training sessions in 16 years and spent the last four years of her sporting career trying to shave 0.01 seconds off her race time. "That's about the same as the width of two sheets of paper," she said.

Asked by presenter Cathy Newman if the prejudice she had sometimes faced as a wheelchair user upset her, Thompson admitted it did, but added: "I think the resilience I learnt from competing enables me to step back from that -¦ I try to be really calm about it because it's about trying to educate people. A lot of the time it comes from a place of not understanding."

"If we let populism rule, when we have vacuums left by not being under EU law, will we make the wrong decisions because we respond to the most recent accidents and what the newspapers want us to do?" asked safety coach and writer Bridget Leathley in a debate on the rise of populism in politics and the Brexit vote.

A delegate countered that practitioners must help drive standards and shape the new laws after Brexit. Former IOSH president Lawrence Waterman, who convened the session responded: "The implication of what you've said is that we need to be more activist than we have been."
An end-of-session poll of delegates on the question, "Are populist politics a threat to our health and safety standards?" revealed 61% believed they were.

In an earlier breakfast session on the ISO 45001 management systems standard IOSH policy head Richard Jones noted some of the new challenges the standard -- due to be published early next year -- would pose to those used to certifying their organisations to BS OHSAS 18001. These included setting fixed targets for continual improvement, monitoring supply chain safety and opening up all senior staff to questioning by certification auditors. "Top management may need some coaching," Jones warned.

Jones was back discussing supply chain issues along with corporate social responsibility in a later session with a panel including Kirsten Margrethe Hovi of Norwegian aluminium producer Norsk Hydro. Asked whether managers should be targeted on safety in performance-related pay systems, Hovi said yes. "My CEO won't get his bonus if there are any fatal accidents or we don't hit our target total incident rate," she said.

IOSH president elect Craig Foyle, who stepped up to the institution's most senior elected post at the end of the conference, reported on the results of research commissioned from pollsters Opinium which found two-fifths of business leaders said that sickness absence had significantly dented their organisations' productivity in the past five years.

He was followed by Tony Bickerstaffe, chief financial officer of infrastructure contractor Costain who said that investing in a health and wellbeing programme was a straight business proposition for his company. He believed measures such as mandatory mental health awareness training for managers and extending the company's employee assistance programme to 26,000 subcontractors would pay dividends in attracting talent and making his firm an employer people actively sought. He had taken soundings at a recent gathering of graduate recruits and the most common motivation for choosing Costain was: "I heard it was a good company to work for."

At the end of the conference delegates were invited back to Birmingham's ICC for IOSH 2018 next September.

You may also be interested in...

Matthew Taylor

 IOSH 2017: Day 1

Monday 20th November 2017
The strongest came from IOSH chief executive Bev Messinger who launched the conference with an overview of progress on the WORK 2022 strategy that aims to improve safety and health standards worldwide by collaboration and influence. As an aside to an overview of IOSH’s aims for its WORK 2022 strategy which aims to help cut the estimated work-related death toll of 2.78 million a year by collaborating with and influencing bodies worldwide, Messinger told delegates her brother-in-law had been killed in a workplace accident on 12 October.
Open-access content
Image credit: ©Thomas Ashton Institute

 HSE and Manchester academics launch new risk institute

Thursday 30th November 2017
One of the key aims of the new Thomas Ashton Institute (www.ashtoninstitute.ac.uk), due to be launched formally in in April 2018, will be to make the lessons learned from four decades of incident investigations and research more accessible to industry. The partners say they hope the institute’s work will help to make sure mistakes are not repeated as new technologies and industries are developed.
Open-access content
The Thriving at Work review was published today

 Stevenson-Farmer review urges stronger HSE action on mental health

Thursday 26th October 2017
The report has made 40 recommendations for businesses, regulators, the government and the public sector after it found one worker in six suffers from a mental illness and 300,000 people with long-term mental health problems lose their jobs every year.
Open-access content

 Hackitt fire review calls for simpler regulatory structure

Monday 18th December 2017
High-risk and complex buildings - defined as those “where multiple people live or stay and for which exceptional events could lead to the risk of large-scale fatalities” – are subject to regulations which are too complex and poorly implemented, says the report.The report calls for “simplified and unambiguous” regulations and guidance on fire safety. It says as an interim measure the government should consider “presentational changes” to improve the clarity of Approved Document B, which accompanies the Building Regulations.
Open-access content
© iStock/AvigatorPhotographer

 Process safety neglected in board discussions

Tuesday 19th December 2017
Dupont surveyed 82 senior managers from the oil and gas, mining, chemical manufacturing and construction sectors. Only just over two respondents in five said they discussed process safety and asset integrity at board meetings. But more than half reviewed general safety, health and environment metrics and regulatory compliance.If boards do not focus on operational risk, they can fall prey to the “illusion of understanding”, warned DuPont, in which “performance indicators may show positive trends but risks remain hidden, waiting to strike [at] any time”.
Open-access content
©N Chadwick (cc-by-sa/2.0)

 ‘Corner-cutting’ Southeastern to pay £2.5m after cleaner electrocuted on live rail

Thursday 23rd November 2017
The two companies were sentenced on 17 November at Guildford Crown Court. The court was told that Wetton Cleaning Services employee Roger Lower, 46, was working a night shift at the West Marina Depot in St Leonards-on-Sea, Hastings. He had been washing the exterior of a train before his colleagues found him lying on the live rail on 24 May 2014. Emergency services were called but they were unable to save his life.
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