What Is Health and Safety?

Health and safety has become an important part of our daily lives, both in our personal lives and our working lives too. In actual fact, good health and safety can be the difference between life or death, or perhaps some other serious form of injury. The fact that we all take health and safety much more seriously these days means that the incidence of accidents occurring (both in the workplace and at home), is vastly reduced.

One of the big steps forward has been the introduction of the risk assessment in the workplace. It’s really quite amazing before risk assessments were adopted, how ‘gung-ho’many people were when it came to carrying out certain activities in the workplace. Today however, most companies will ensure that a proper risk assessment is carried out; even if the end result is that there is no risk in the activity at all.

One of the key factors in carrying out an effective risk assessment is to check for the necessity for wearing PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). PPE covers a wide range of products from safety boots to hard-hats, and from defenders to high visibility vests. In the early days of PPE, fashion was given very little thought by the manufacturers, so the types of products that were available were quite restricted in terms of style. For example safety shoes were really only available originally as great big clod hoppers, whereas today you have a much more fashionable range of choice, including things like reinforced trainers. However, whilst these reinforced trainers might look much more fashionable, I wouldn’t like to recommend playing a game of tennis in them! But other items of work-wear are now available not only in a range of fashionable designs, but in a wide range of colours too.

Certain items of PPE clothing can be fashionable as well as functional; manufacturers strive to keep PPE ‘user friendly’ in order that they are worn as intended, to personally protect the wearer, rather than ridiculed for being out-dated and left stuffed in the back of a locker because nobody wants to be seen ‘dead’in them.

PPE can be quite expensive and as such they need to be carefully monitored, and their distribution recorded. Asset tagging is an effective way of asset tracking; in other words being able to conveniently and easily log where your assets are.