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Re: Sharp knives
The role of senior management
The importance of senior management’s commitment to the success of any new working arrangements is well known, and this is especially true when the attitudes of the workforce also have to be changed. The attitudes of senior managers will set an example for others to follow, and any hand knife initiative therefore needs their visible backing.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/ppis12.pdf
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Re: Sharp knives
having done almost forty years in senior management, with no fatalities , and having served on Health and Safety committees for a lot of that time you can have every protocol and system available , you will never eliminate accidents , the higher the risk the more preventative measures you can put in place , the use of chain mail gloves for a start , but to assume management can eliminate all risks is a dangerous precedence because you cannot eliminate stupidity
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Re: Sharp knives
Rob
At a senior officers conference where the Safety Management were banging on about if we correctly followed all the SMS written procedures we could eliminate all lost time accidents. I made the same comments as you have in your post, saying that you can never eliminate accidents, just reduce their severity. This, of course was poo-pooed by the safety management who wanted every and all accidents, however minor, recorded and investigated by the on board ship's safety committee with results of the investigation and methods to prevent similar accidents to be sent to head office. This was basically a way of showing to their customers how safety conscious the company was. Imsuggested that instead of calling these minor scrapes and bumps accidents, we should call them " happenings" or something similar and not bother to go through all the tedious procedures required for such minor things. Well that went down like a lead balloon.
Rgds
J.A.
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Re: Sharp knives
As a "Works Engineer" at a very large multi national and attending such meetings I felt on a few occasions when "severity and risk" were embarked upon that the Accountants very often overrode decent proposals with cost evaluations. While studying for I.O.S.H. this was also mentioned
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Re: Sharp knives
All you can do is reduce risk , but at a factory producing 30% caustic soda , that I used to deal with , smallest minor infringement or near miss the employee was clocked out and sent home , this included climbing stairs without holding handrail , good pay good conditions - but tough
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Excellent way to instill "ownership" Rob
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If safety costs money, Forget it.
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It's actually a trade-off Brian what do you have to ask is if it goes wrong and somebody gets injured and as the management of the company you have not done or you can to lessen the risk you can easily face a £1000000 claim against your insurer so what you have to do is spend a minimum amount to protect yourself against that claim and show that you have done all you can to lessen the risk to a point where the severity of any accident is minimised
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Re: Sharp knives
Some believe that the H.S.E. came into its' own after the tregedy of the Herald of Free Enterprise when charges of corporate manslaughter were being flashed around at the Top. Some see it as a process of rolling the brown stuff downhill, although you are told at any enquiry to be truthful as H.S.E. is a "no blame culture".
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Re: Sharp knives
the Corporate Manslaughter act did not come into force until 2007 but Zeebrugge certainly helped the introduction