April 2005
Beyond Compliance
The need to achieve regulatory compliance has been one of the most important driving forces behind advancements in occupational health and safety (OH&S) in North America and Europe over the past 30 years and one that will continue to shape it.
In a rapidly changing and complex global economy, compliance has sought to keep pace with industrial and technological developments. The result has been a dramatic rise in the range and scope of health and safety legislation.
Increased Regulatory Requirements
The expansion of the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) responsibilities in the 1980s and 1990s prompted a steady stream of regulations designed to address new workplace risks, some of which included: Control of Industrial Major Accident Hazards Regulations (CIMAH), Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR), Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations (CAWR) and Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations (COSHH).
More recently, the focus has shifted towards addressing corporate governance and accountability. While the HSE has responded with a number of initiatives, such as publishing guidance on directors’ responsibilities for health and safety and prosecuting a total of 22 managers and directors in 2002/2003, the proposed “Corporate Manslaughter Bill”, currently under review by the government, perhaps best exemplifies the current tide of legislation. The bill will make it easier to prosecute individual corporations who are found negligent in their health and safety responsibilities.
The Need for an Effective, Enterprise-wide Management System
Effectively managing compliance remains a tall order. An organization must assemble and make sense of data from a variety of different sources, multiple disciplines and functional areas; e.g., Medical, Safety, Industrial Hygiene and Absence Management; as well as consolidating information from global operations with multiple legislative regimes. Without an integrated, enterprise-wide information management system, this process is fraught with difficulty. For example, an enterprise may have stand-alone, disparate systems for each of the functional areas. As such, the medical practitioners may be treating a worker for an illness related to chemical exposure in the workplace without easy access to the air sample results collected by the industrial hygienist or to the results of the safety facility audits in the work area. Another disadvantage of disparate systems is that the same basic data about an employee, his history and his condition must be recorded in each of the systems dealing with the same occupational illness. In such a case, data entry becomes redundant, preventing health and safety professionals from directing their most valuable resources towards proactive management of the health and wellbeing of their employees. In addition, the process of merging this data from multiple systems together is complex and risks items slipping through the cracks, creating a compliance breech.
An integrated occupational health and safety management system avoids all these pitfalls, while at the same time transforming an organization’s ability to address workplace health and safety. For example, integrated systems provide clients with an enterprise-wide and web-based system to address the regulatory management of both medical and education surveillance requirements. The extensive reporting capabilities of this feature eliminate the administrative burden of recalling employees for health and safety training certification.
An integrated occupational health and safety system provides the most important tool of all, information – information gleaned from all functional areas and from the far reaches of the enterprise’s global operations. Disparate systems can enable regulatory compliance across sites; however, an integrated, enterprise-wide occupational health and safety system can take a firm beyond compliance. Empowered with information, organizations can identify problem areas, lagging sites, and implement corrective actions and modify behaviors in order to reduce the risks of workplace injury or illness and contribute to organizations human resource productivity.
Pro Enviro, in conjunction with Medgate, offer comprehensive support in the field of health and safety management and integrated systems.
For a review of your health and safety performance and advice on risk assessment, particularly for integrating management systems and training at all levels, contact Aneeta Patel or Steve Stones via email or telephone 024 7632 3260.
For more information on Medgate send an email to contactus@medgate.com or visit their website.
Print this page