You can find harmful substances in a range of products used in your working environment: cleaning products, paint, fumes, waste etc, but before any panic sets in it is worth noting that although they can harm the health of your employees and visitors, used properly they normally don’t. We all know about asbestosis and emphysema

A good integrated system means combining all your internal management practices into one system to become an integral part of your company’s management system. The linkages have to be seamless between the processes and this includes people, equipment and culture as well as processes and documented procedures. You can integrate anything and everything which has

If the latest proposed changes to the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 are approved, employers will no longer have a duty to report diseases arising out of a work activity.  It is felt that there are sufficient alternative methods of gathering this data, and the present reporting system relies upon obtaining

The Health and Safety Executive have embarked on a consultation process on plans to introduce what would be called the Health and Safety (Sharp Instruments in Healthcare) Regulations 2013. These are to enable the UK to meet a European Council Directive on preventing injuries in the healthcare sector caused by the use and disposal of

Hazardous substances in the workplace are potentially dangerous to staff and to the environment. To manage these substances most organisations develop, issue and implement the controls as described in a COSHH Assessment. The assessment is simply a description of the main hazards to health with a description of the controls to be implemented to reduce

BS EN ISO 13485:2012 has now been issued which will supersede the current version ISO 13485:2003.   But you may be asking yourself why the change was so low key? The simple answer is that it is the European version that has been updated and other countries outside of Europe therefore still use ISO 13485:2003. Why

A new draft structure for ISO standards has been produced.   This is the document that ISO teams/technical Comittees will now use when revising all management system standards. It has already been decided that ISO 14001 will adopt the new structure so over the next few years it is probable that ISO 9001, and other

Six Sigma is a systematic method for improving business performance, has been published as a two ISO standards; ISO 13053-1:2011 and ISO 13053-2:2011. Six Sigma was originally developed by Motorola in the 1980s with the goal of process improvement.    A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected

From the most FAQs, test yourself on the questions below and then go to the link at the bottom of this blog and click on each question to see the HSE answers and guidelines for ea. Is it safe? Which is safer: alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC)? Everyone gets a ‘belt’ from electricity every now

For those of you who are not familiar with ISO 19011, this is a set of guidelines for auditing management systems first issued in 2002. A revised version of the standard is expected to be published before the end of 2011. What impact will this have on your business? Two things have changed significantly in