WORKPLACE SAFETY

Health and Safety at Workplace



Health and Safety at Workplace

Introduction

Health and safety in business is a broad concept and covers many specialized fields. The area covered by the concept of Health & Safety is extremely extensive when the various industries have been taken into account, for each business sector has health and safety issues. If any business perform such job well and no one is injured then by default they will have also protected the company, its owners, directors and managers from any legal action that might have resulted in any damage that might otherwise have been caused (Robson, 2007, pp. 329). To practice health and safety standards in business, each business has to achieve some goals, in which employer's collaboration and participation are essential. Major role is to protect the workforce, or employees (Nicholson and Nicholson, 2004, pp. 147). However, depending on the company, they will be working to ensure that visitors, customers, clients, and even members of the public are not put at risk by anything the company does, produces, sells, hires out, builds and constructs. A majority of health and safety risks arise from the mishandling and mismanagement of machinery and equipment at work. Hence, organization needs to adopt such strategies and policies that ensure efficient management of the workplace machinery and equipment.

This paper aims at discussing the importance of adopting such strategies and policies that ensure efficient management of the workplace machinery and equipment for an organization, through its different life cycle stages using the Cradle-to-Grave Approach.

Discussion

Often, less attention is paid to the problems of business health to job security because it is usually more difficult to resolve those. However, when addressing the issue of health, also addresses the security, because, by definition, a healthy workplace is also a safe workplace. Instead, it may not be true in reverse, as a considered safe workplace is not necessarily also a healthy workplace (Johnstone, 2005, pp. 93). The crucial thing to be addressed in every business is health and safety issues.

The technological advancement in the work place has brought blessings for the companies, but at the same time, they have affected the work environment and created health/safety issues for employees. This paper discusses the physical work setting of a company and safety and health issues related to the work setting.

The “Cradle-to-Grave Approach” implies that proper and adequate safety measures and practices are implemented by an organization, for its machinery and equipment resources, from the time of their design to their manufacture, installation and commissioning, and to their storage. Strategies should also be devised for their safe transportation, while, in case of sale or disposal, the procedure followed should reflect compliance to the safety regulations and requirements (Cooper and Cotton 2000, pp. 470). This approach ensures that workers and employees are safe from the risks of accidents and injuries that different machineries and equipments bring with them. This requires that the management carefully assesses and analyzes the various stages of life cycle of machinery and formulates a strategy that ...