The implementation of health and safety measures (H&S) at work are essential in maintaining employee and client wellbeing. Health and Safety Manager Lucy Walsh, was able to provide an insight in to how Orion stays vigilant with H&S, as well as its importance.
The Importance of Health and Safety at Orion
Upon speaking with Lucy, she emphasised the role that H&S plays in ensuring employees leave work in the good health that they arrived in; this applies to both engineers and office-based staff.
Ensuring Orion completes a job as safely as possible also effects clients. For example, when working in large residency buildings/schools, Orion aims to create as little disruption as possible, allowing clients to carry on safely with their day-to-day.
The methodical H&S system implemented at Orion allows all team members to acquire the same level of knowledge and use the same processes. Lucy explains the importance of this in ensuring that everyone is working to the same standard, as well as preventing faults.
How Does Orion Effectively Manage Health and Safety?
The first step in effectively managing H&S is ensuring the competency of staff. As well as Orion’s own engineering team, all subcontractors are internally approved to ensure H&S standards are met before working with clients.
As well as this, Lucy believes it is the use of detailed method statements, internal auditing and risk assessments (RAMs) that allow Orion’s H&S strategy to work so efficiently.
Ensuring Employees are Compliant
In order to keep staff up to date, Orion use a matrix to monitor training history and make plans for the future. Upon joining the Orion team, the training history of a new employee is uploaded to the matrix to identify any gaps/ support needed.
Throughout the year, competency assessments and ‘toolbox talks’ ensure that engineers are kept up to date on relevant industry subjects such as: height training, first aid, fire awareness etc. These constant refreshers are essential at Orion.
As well as this, both fire warden training and first aid courses are offered to employees. With the help of such opportunities, employee knowledge remains up to date and consistently expanding.
Client Communication
H&S at Orion is not solely an internal matter. Lucy emphasises the importance of communication between Orion and the client in the H&S process. For every job that Orion complete, RAMS are issued to the client, as well as a construction phase plan.
The client is always entitled to see detailed H&S audits of their site, and will work with Orion to identify potential problems. Regular project meetings keep each client well informed, where H&S is always a topic of conversation.
Accreditations
At Orion we aim to gain as many H&S accreditations as possible. Not only do these accreditations convey how seriously H&S is taken at Orion, but they also mean that the client can rest assure that work will be carried out safely. Within these accreditations we aim to gain the highest standard.
