The media love to talk about compliance and red tape in relation to small businesses. While there may be some truth in it I think it means many people think health and safety is much more complex than it really is.

H&S really is about nothing more than making sure people are safe at work. It puts systems and processes around assessing and managing risk – something we do every day when we drive, cook a meal, cross the road or loads of other activities.

For example, if you run a machine shop then obviously you want to minimise risk by making sure staff are trained, the equipment is kept safe and working properly, and any injuries that do happen are dealt with and reviewed to make sure they don’t happen again. All this is the job of the H&S policy and the procedures you put in place, but unfortunately people don’t often see it like that.

The other day I was running a workshop for a client in the health sector and to be honest I think many were wondering what H&S had to do with them. As we talked about risks and the mechanics of managing them you could see lightbulbs going on – suddenly the incident and accident reports stopped being about “extra work”, and started being about how you keep a workplace safe.

The trick to getting on top of your H&S is about having sensible policies that everyone buys into. A competent advisor can do this with a minimum of fuss – and potentially save you a huge headache in the long run. We shouldn’t allow the media to colour our views – we should find out for ourselves!

Sian MacGowan