Health & Safety during the CoronaVirus Pandemic

Wow what a very different 6 months we have just experienced rather than what we had planned in our diaries.

It has been quite shocking the way the whole world has had to stop, pivot and change total direction in what was on the agenda for their business.

Personally I had to cancel a number of events, weekly networking events, training sessions and site visits and I am very pleased to say these have either been carried out online or have now been re-booked in for later in 2020.

I have been very grateful for a laptop and the internet to enable me to carry on working. I do tend to work from my office at home so not a lot of change for me to be honest.

I acted on the reactions of my clients as there was so much panic, stress and worry coming from so many directions with my clients so my first role was to try and calm them down and then talk to each client about how to manage their business in a compliant Health & Safety way.

I updated myself as needed with the Government and HSE alerts so that I would be as updated as I could be with all the many changes.

I put together a COVID-19 training course and throughout the month of June offered this free to all businesses – this was to support companies and to celebrate being in business for 30 years.

There were a number of changes to take into account such as First Aid Procedures, Fire Checks, Legionella testing and Regulatory equipment checks etc. so we had to cover all of these issues. We have had to implement additional training, protective screens, social distancing stickers and signs, implement cleaning schedules, purchase sanitising stations, relocate staff, work equipment and desks, move training to online, produce and update risk assessments and document so many different procedures for different companies.

Many companies had to adapt to working from home and this meant setting up work stations with their laptops and trying to work as safely as possible taking into account maybe some home-schooling duties too. So many of my clients also set up weekly calls with their staff to check on their mental health as this has been a huge concern for so many people with all the added stress of working from home and maybe being on their own or even in challenging relationships. A huge number of people had been put on furlough and couldn’t work so again there were so many concerns with this area too. So stress and mental health have been a huge part of my work recently.

During the last few months there have been many different industries and businesses returning to work such as schools, pubs, restaurants, tenpin bowling centres, beauty, offices and many more each week. Some of my clients are very nervous at returning back to work and some staff are scared maybe due to the amount of mis information in the media or maybe are in the vulnerable health group of people.

My clients know that working with me is easy – we just communicate on a regular basis – wherever there is a problem there is always a solution and working together we find it.