Health and safety on the Internet

Citation

Finch, E. (1998), "Health and safety on the Internet", Facilities, Vol. 16 No. 5/6. https://doi.org/10.1108/f.1998.06916eag.001

Health and safety on the Internet

Health and safety on the Internet

This issue of Facilities examines useful sources of information regarding health and safety in the workplace. Increasingly, governments are realising that the Internet is a very effective mechanism for disseminating information. As a result, they are making guidance and regulatory documents available either directly online or in a downloadable format (e.g. in the popular Adobe PDF format). This is good news for facilities managers who are keen to ensure that they have the most up to date information at their fingertips without the unnecessary cost of purchasing and document storage. Below are a number of government bodies and institutions actively involved in research and enforcement of health and safety regulations in the workplace.

Health and Safety Executive

URL: http://www.open.gov.uk/hse/hsehome. htm

The Health & Safety Executive is the main UK enforcement body concerned with health and safety. Its aim is to "ensure that risks to people's health and safety from work activities are properly controlled":

The law says: (1) employers have to look after the health and safety of their employees; (2) employees and the self-employed have to look after their own health and safety; (3) and all have to take care of the health and safety of others, for example, members of the public who may be affected by their work activity. Our job is to see that everyone does this (Quote from HSE Website).

Its activities include:

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  inspecting workplaces;

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  investigating accidents and cases of ill health;

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  enforcing good standards;

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  publishing guidance and advice;

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  providing an information service;

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  carrying out research.

The site itself has contact information, details of publications, press releases and online information about current legislation. It has particularly interesting sections relating to different types of work. An example is the document on "Homeworking ­ Guidance for employers and employees on health and safety" which details how to carry out a risk assessment; dealing with pregnant mothers; trade union issues; and first-aid.

The press release section is up-to-date: at the time of writing I was able to obtain the latest information about seating ergonomics from a revised publication Seating at Work, ref HSG57, ISBN 0 7176 1231 7, published by the HSE. There are typically about 15 news releases every month at this site. From a UK perspective this is an invaluable source of reference and the research information will also be of interest to facilities managers in other countries.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration

URL: http://www.osha.gov/

The OSHA is the main US law enforcement agency related to health and safety in the USA. Their Website is in-depth and is directly comparable with the HSE site in the UK. It contains information on ergonomics; standards; contacts and programmes. Another feature unique to this site is a type of intelligent guide which allows you to interrogate the most frequently violated standards. The intelligence takes the form of a search form which requires the user to enter the industry classification (SIC) and the number of employees in the organisation. From this, the database is able to produce a complete listing of relevant legislation to the user. Hopefully we will start to see more of this kind of functionality on the Web.

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health

URL: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/homepage. html

Although NIOSH and OSHA were created by the same Act of Congress, they are two distinct agencies with separate responsibilities. OSHA is in the Department of Labor and is responsible for creating and enforcing workplace safety and health regulations. NIOSH is in the Health and Human Services and is a research agency. NIOSH identifies the causes of work-related diseases and injuries and the potential hazards of new work technologies and practices. With this information, NIOSH determines new and effective ways to protect workers from chemicals, machinery, and hazardous working conditions. Creating new ways to prevent workplace hazards is the job of NIOSH.

Figure 1 Example of an International Chemical Safety Card downloaded from the World Wide Web

The NIOSH has links to a number of databases including the International Chemical Safety Cards (ICSC). An ICSC summarises essential health and safety information on chemicals for their use at the "shopfloor" level by workers and employers in factories, agriculture, construction and other workplaces. An example of one such card, found by an online search from the Web, is shown in Figure 1.

Summary

This Internet editorial has only touched on some of the health and safety resources available on the Internet for facilities managers. The purpose of the editorial has been to demonstrate the depth of government information that is now available online. With increasing pressures for cost efficiency we can expect to see governments favouring electronic dissemination as this approach significantly reduces production costs and allows successive updates without creating substantial amounts of obsolete hardcopy material. For the facilities manager this can only mean good news: they can have access to current information in a form which is searchable, storable and which does not occupy acres of filing space.

Edward Finch