To Measure Or Not To Measure - That is the Question!

Elf and Safety’ (H&S) gets something of a bad press these days with the most benign of activities being banned by allegedly over-zealous people. This is unfortunately driven as a response to the ‘where there’s blame there’s a claim’ culture that has emerged over the last few years.

However, when it comes to the workplace it is a different matter. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) report that some 160 million people worldwide suffer from occupational related diseases, with over 2 million deaths attributed annually
as a result. These figures don’t include countless fatal or serious injuries caused by accidents, which makes working seemingly a risky business.

Risk is all about combining the likelihood of something happening with the severity of that occurrence and it is an assessment of that risk which drives measures to remove or mitigate the potential root cause. It’s worth making a distinction between safety and health issues early on. Safety is associated with short term, potentially life-threatening issues like exposure to gas (with a risk of explosion or asphyxiation) or heatstroke due to a combination of high temperature and humidity, for example.

Health issues on the other hand can be caused by relatively longer term accumulated exposure to agents like noise, vibration, dust and chemicals, the latter two particularly leading to the premature deaths mentioned by the ILO.