Explaining the Need for Health and Safety Consultants - By: Kathryn Dawson

Behind all the money, lawsuits and settlements, peace of mind simply cannot be bought. Families involved often suffer the worst that could ever happen to them having to deal with distraught emotions that cannot be forgotten over a lifetime.

In truth, which it could have been avoided at all costs simply by raising awareness and taking necessary precautions such as ensuring your company has an effective process for health and safety management. The stakes are simply too high to ignore the risks involved.

Hiring a firm of health and safety consultants could save your business money. Just recently, a steel firm in Cardiff had to pay £80,000 in penalties when their employee was injured severely due to an electrical failure experiencing a shock of 33,000 volts while cleaning electrical conductors and circuit breaker units. Another company had to shell out £13,000 in costs and fines when their worker was badly burned with another electrical failure. And yet another incident, where a businessman admitted to letting an employee use a damaged ladder resulting to the employee's broken spine, was asked to pay £6,000 in penalties. Employment law consultants offer all round advice and can help you avoid paying out such large sums.

In 2010 alone the number of reported non-fatal job-related injuries amounted to an astounding 144,920 incidents. From April to September of the same year there were 123 reported fatal job-related incidents. Note that almost half of these injuries and fatalities remain unreported and these figures do not include work-related illnesses. Yet, this is already an improvement from the statistics recorded in 2008-2009. In fact it was a 31% decrease.

In order to help decrease the annual rate of these incidents, a company must comply with health a safety laws. As always, laws are a bit complex to understand with all the technical details and requirements to be fully understood in layman's terms. This is where health and safety consultants come in. They are the experts in this industry that can assist you with everything you need to know or clarify with the current requirements and laws as well as aid you in implementing these changes with supervision.

Areas where health and safety consultants can help include: avoiding potential prosecutions, better health and safety performance, reducing the rate of absenteeism, maintaining risk management processes, ensuring compliance to current laws, communicating with official departments or regulatory boards, looking into your current health and safety training modules and recreate them for better training materials, writing, re-writing and updating your current health and safety policies for better awareness and company memos or circulars, monitoring compliance to the policies created and keeping statistics on overall company health and safety.

Health and safety consultants are trained, certified to the specific industry group they service and a member of NASP, National Association of Safety Professionals.

Now that it is stated how a health and safety consultant might assist you, it is time to really understand if this is something you need. Getting accreditation for your company for particular standards are generally expensive and hiring consultants can immensely cut this cost but they do not come cheap either. So really focus if it is something necessary or not.

There are a lot of things to consider as well when seeking the service of a consultant for your health and safety management needs such as competency in being able to deliver according to your expectations, affiliation or membership to the right professional body, has a proven track record of expertise, has clients who can give you feedback and testimonials with the quality of service they received so you can make sure your consultant is worth the investment and most importantly make sure that your consultant is insured.

As always, whenever hiring for any of your company needs, whether you are seeking the expertise of health and safety consultants or employment law consultants there are a multitude of companies you can readily search online. The decision relies solely on you. Once setting an appointment, you will know immediately if you will be comfortable working with your consultant or not. This is the most important factor to consider since you will always be entrusting your company to your consultant.

About the Author

Kathryn Dawson writes articles about PosiSure, a team of employment law consultants and health and safety consultants in the UK. PosiSure covers all aspects of health and safety management including outsourcing, inspections, audits and risk assessments.

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