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Tag: Safety

Personal Safety Training


It’s okay, he has his safety tie on

This month’s big team meeting was given over to the University’s Security Manager for a session on personal safety, and touched upon conflict management. More security than safety then, but ‘safety’ is a friendlier term. When I think of personal safety I tend to think more along the lines of the great Colin Furze and his shenanigans.

It was unexpected training, and pretty useful. We learned about de-escalating situations from a number of problem-based learning scenarios, the institutional and personal responsibilities with regards to duty of care and health and safety, and what the University is doing to keep us all safe at work. This includes, however you feel about it, the network of 400 security cameras on Sunderland campus, the relatively new wider campus card controlled building access, and the Estates team are pushing for us to get a system called Safe Zone which is an app based panic button. We are, apparently, the only university in the North East not already using this.

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Fire Awareness Training

The Plug Dilemma
The Paradox Plug! Sure you can click on the image, but it don’t do nothin’

Fire safety awareness training time again. A useful refresher, but the content hasn’t changed, and any new learning was constructed from the training’s test unit which consisted of a mix of questions that were either patently obvious or about things that weren’t covered in the training. While that latter group could have been infuriating, I found it the most useful because they made me have to think and work out the correct answer logically. I passed, first time, 90%.

The other thing I “enjoy” about these mandatory online training courses is critiquing the quality of the content and platform. And how we would have done it better. Consider the image I’ve screen-shotted here: “Click image to make it safer”. Well, you can’t. The image isn’t interactive. In fact there is no interactivity in the training at all, despite being referenced like this in many slides; it was just a text-only presentation with next and previous buttons. 4/10.

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Fire Safety eLearning

HR caught up with me again, this time making me take my fire safety training. Which was fair enough, as according to my records on here I haven’t done this since 2014. Not a lot has changed, it’s all fairly common sense advice – understanding how fires start and how they can be stopped, how to prevent by keeping the work environment clean and tidy, not using socket adapters, etc., and what to do in the event of a fire – basically, raise the alarm and leave via nearest route, or use the appropriate extinguisher if safe to do so.

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Workplace Safety Plus

Ah, compulsory health and safety training, delivered online! Prompted by our move to new offices on our campus north of the river. Yes, my chair and computer are at the right height; yes, I do solemnly swear to take breaks from the computer for 10 minutes in every hour; no, I am not going to take a laptop riser, external keyboard, and mouse into meetings with me or when I have to work away from my usual desk.

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Session 15: Health and Safety

velociraptor

The second half day optional module on the Leading from the Middle programme and the final session. Rather than a straight up session on health and safety itself, the focus was on our responsibilities as leaders in ensuring a culture of workplace safety and our responsibilities and obligations under law, specifically as pertains to the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974.

The session was divided into five units of work. The first unit was on the roles and responsibilities of line mangers in ensuring that the university’s commitment to health and safety is fully cascaded to all staff, and the need for us to lead by example in embedding this culture throughout all of the university’s activity. Leading on from this, the second unit covered the university’s policies and procedures relating to health and safety and what responsibilities we each have for ensuring that the university environment is safe for all. For myself, this includes leading on risk assessments for my team, monitoring the office environment, and resolving any potential hazards as they are discovered or arise.

Unit 3 went into the detail of how to assess and control risk. For a practical exercise in this we were presented with a scenario, a picture of a large kitchen area that you would see in, for example, a hotel, and were asked to identify all of the potential hazards, e.g. open flames, hot surfaces, sharp corners, water near electrical outlets, etc. There was something about the image, perhaps the angle, that reminded me of the scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors got into the kitchen in pursuit of the kids. We were then introduced to the university’s risk assessment matrix which scores the risk of an activity by assessing the likelihood of an accident occurring against the severity of the potential injury on a scale of 1 to 25. I had to concede that though rampaging velociraptors are highly unlikely, there is a good chance of fatality in such a scenario, therefore warranting a score of 5 on our matrix. According to our guidelines, with such a low score no corrective action needs to be taken to lower the risk, but the activity should continue to be monitored.

Unit 4 covered how to investigate accidents and incidents. First we were introduced to two conceptual models on how accidents happen. The Swiss Cheese Model posits that when an accident happens it is because of a series of holes in barriers and safeguards which align, and the Domino Theory which depicts an accident as a cascade of events. We then discussed how to investigate an incident in order to uncover both the direct and root causes, and the university’s obligations under RIDDOR, the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations.

Finally, unit 5 covered how health and safety performance is measured at the university. This includes both proactive methods such as audits and inspections which are informed by our policies and procedures, and reactive activities such as recording accidents and near misses.

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