A Health & Safety Manager’s and Fire Warden’s Responsibilities

Posted 5 years ago

Workplace Health & Safety can be a tricky subject to tackle as an employer. If you don’t have the right knowledge or qualifications, then it can become difficult to identify and mitigate Health & Safety risks. That’s why it’s important to have a Health & Safety Manager in place to ensure that Health & Safety remains at the forefront of your organisation.

A Health and Safety Manager’s responsibility is to ensure that the workplace is a safe environment for workers. They monitor work areas to identify any hazards, investigate accidents, educate employees about risks, and take necessary actions to fix any problems.

Having a Health & Safety Manager in place can help prevent workplace accidents and injuries and ensure that employees are working in compliance with HSE legislation.

A Health & Safety Manager’s responsibilities:

A Health and Safety Manager is accountable for the overall health and safety performance of an organisation. It’s important that hazards and risks are considered before they become a problem and that clear guidelines are put in place to ensure that employees are safe and working in compliance with HSE legislation.

The key responsibilities of a Health & Safety manager include:

Monitoring health and safety risks & hazards
Offering health and safety advice to employees
Working alongside employees to improve and monitor the health and safety standards in the workplace
Helping employees to avoid and minimise risks in the workplace
Helping to create and manage health and safety policies and monitoring systems
Making sure the business complies with health and safety legislation
Ensuring inspections are carried out when needed
Managing emergency procedures and ensuring that they are in place for when one occurs

Download our free Health & Safety checklist – a great tool for employers or anyone in charge of Health & Safety!

The importance of Health & Safety training

As a Health and Safety Manager, it is your responsibility not to just view Health & Safety training as a tick-box exercise that helps you work towards compliance but more as an exercise that genuinely improves working life for every person.

For most, 50% of total waking hours are spent at work. This means employers have a moral duty as well as legal duty to make sure their staff are safe. Now I understand this means more work, but is less work more valuable than someone’s life? 142 people in the UK lost their lives between 2020/21 due to work-related injuries and some of these, with the right training could have been prevented.

As a Health and Safety Manager, it’s not just your staff you affect, it is also their friends and family you are putting at risk by not training staff.

Every job is dangerous whether that be mentally or physically…

Mental ill-health is now finally being recognised as a big problem in the UK, with 1 in 4 people experiencing a mental health-related illness throughout their lives.

Here at iHasco we now have a much better insight into this and have created multiple Mental Health Awareness Training courses to help benefit you further. Business has changed and not only do buyers look at the value and cost of things, but they’ll also be looking deeper into the morales of a business and how they treat their staff – Mental Health & Wellbeing training shows you are willing to look after your staff and go above and beyond.

What a Fire Warden must consider

Fire wardens are one of the most important people in a building when it comes to safety. Why? Because these are the people who will be making sure you leave the building safely in the event of a fire and have the right training to do so. I’m not saying fire wardens will run into a burning building to save you, but they will do everything beforehand to ensure that no one has to!

Fire Awareness Training is sometimes described as repetitive, but then again, the causes of fire always seem to be repetitive or at least have similarities. Why? Because many people do not have the right training in place. The ones that do can deal with fires quickly and save collateral damage (a small price for fire training could save companies thousands of pounds, yet people still risk it… you must be mad!).

As a Fire Warden you should be thinking about what you need to do this year for training and when should people do it. It is all about organisation and timing. If you can get these two factors arranged, then training should run smoothly.

A Fire Warden’s responsibilities include:

Aiding in the creation of fire emergency and evacuation plans
Checking all fire doors are in working order
Ensuring the company has good fire safety practices in the workplace
Remaining calm and taking appropriate action in case of a fire i.e. fighting or evacuating people from the building
Carrying out fire risk assessments
Carrying out fire drills and then assessing if any actions need to be taken as a result. Here at iHasco, we aim to do a fire drill once a month.
Ensure that fire equipment has been correctly installed, is fully functioning and is readily available.
Monitoring general fire safety at all times.

Want free trial access to our Fire Safety courses, Fire Warden or Health & Safety Training courses? Get started, with a free, no-obligation trial today…