Work safe for your employees

With new legislation and evermore sedentary working practices, the awards for workplace related ailments are spiralling and the number of claims is increasing.

Now however employers can demonstrably meet all their responsibilities with a new easy-access online system from Worksafe. This system provides each employee with the resource to check their own working environment for risk; whatís more once the employer has provided this resource, it is the employeeís responsibility to utilise this and accurately input the information. This system will provide the employer with the concise information as to which employees are most at risk and take immediate and appropriate action.

Worksafe UKís PRIAM system has been set up as a preventive system that can detect potential health risks before they get out of control. One of its main aims is to empower its customers to help themselves at a dramatically reduced cost, to comply with Health and Safety regulations. As although most employers are aware of the DSE health and safety legislation they are often unsure about what exactly is required and what they should do; therefore Worksafe provides an easy way for companies to comply with the law, with direct feedback to how they can rectify the health risks. The results promote a more comfortable environment for employees, with the ideology that the company look after their staff.

The web based package uses the software PRIAM (Proactive Risk Identification Analysis and Management); a questionnaire system which enables companies to put together customised questions, that link seamlessly into a Risk Analysis mechanism. It will then calculate and identify the most critical Risk factors in accordance with the employeeís answers and allocate and manage tasks in order to correct them. For example, it can determine whether the respondentís chair is potentially contributing to back problems.

The user friendly system has been introduced in answer to the rise in personal claim injuries, directly linked to the amount of time spent by users and employees operating on computers in the workplace. There are about 100,000 successful personal injury claims a year; in 2002 these safety offence fines averaging a staggering 12,194 per case. It is therefore in a companyís interest to try to prevent these costly accidents by ensuring that employeeís injury risk factors are lowered.

Since the 1970ís the office environment has seen a drastic change in work habits due to the introduction of the personal computer. Employees now tend to be seated in one position for long hours, carrying out repetitive movements; all the time putting enormous stress on their bodies. The Heath and Safety Executive (HSE) estimated that 2.3 million people in Great Britain were suffering from an illness they believed was caused or made worse by their current or past work. The commonest of these injuries are WRULDís (Work Related Upper Limb Disorders), which can lead to permanent disability and RSI (repetitive strain injury); an injury that affects hundreds of thousands of workers a year in Britain and costs the UK industry 5 to 20 billion pounds a year.

This is not the first time that there has been an attempt to mitigate the effects of work station related injuries. In 1990 the European Union passed the ìEuropean Display Screen Directiveî was introduced to impose a legal requirement on employers to assess the use of computers and display screens in the workplace and to ensure that the health and safety of the user was not put at risk.

However despite this clause, the amount of work related injury cases keeps on rising at enormous cost to the companies. In instances where personal injuries at work are taken to court, the company could see themselves paying out thousands of pounds in damages.

In April 2000 an injury to an employee saw a major high street bank paying out 243,000, all because the employee did not have the appropriate keyboard to use when carrying out continuous Data Entry.

The result of court cases such as these not only cost the company thousands of pounds but will also directly damage the companyís image as one that is uncaring towards its staff; not withstanding the fact that recruitment will be adversely affected.