Author: Shaun Williams, Executive Director Engagement and Advancement
- UEB this week was devoted entirely to an in-person two-hour training seminar on Health and Safety. It is an issue that we, and our governing Council, take very seriously indeed, and it features regularly on our meeting agendas, along with a weekly review of the wider University Risk Register.
- The seminar was not just a reminder of the regulatory and legislative framework in which we operate, it was also a salutary reminder – through a number of real life examples – of how relatively simple failings, or a sequence of seemingly innocuous failings, or a failure of management to ask the right questions and then do something with the answers, can have life-changing consequences, or worse.
- We are relatively confident that we have in place a robust and effective approach to health and safety and our management of risk at university and local level, which we discuss regularly in many forums and with our campus trades unions, but we can never be complacent. The seminar also underlined the importance of everyone in our community undertaking our mandatory health and safety training and regular refresher training, and over the coming weeks we will be discussing further how we can ensure full compliance with this training, and how we might use the annual appraisals process to support and encourage a “lived” culture of health and safety.
- Strong and active leadership by all our managers is clearly critical on this issue, to keep our community safe and healthy on our campuses, which is after all our prime responsibility. UEB will continue to return to this issue regularly.