Health and safety policies are a useful way to keep workers safe in the workplace. These are just one part of a companies larger health and safety culture and a large part of that culture is understanding the terminology. The problem is, in health and safety especially, there are a lot of terms that overlap, have similar but different meaning, or are downright used incorrectly by a large portion of the community. This can make safety seem far more difficult than it is.
To try and recitify this issue we have put together some descriptions for commonly used terms in relation to company health and safety policies. Hopefully these will help to clarify some of the terms and make things seema bit more easy.
Health and Safety Policy
A health and safety policy, or just policy, is a rule, guideline, or standard that must be followed in the workplace under a specific condition. They can be very short and consice or a bit longer – but they will always be for a specific task, situation, or scenario. Health and safety policies and policy review tend to be a smaller piece that make up the more in depth aspects for a companies health and safety.
“Hard hat must be worn beyond this point.”
Health and Safety Procedure
A health and safety procedure is step by step process on how to complete a specific task. These are required when a task has been identified to be hazardous in some way. The procedure is implemented to specify the correct steps to use, in which order, to ensure workers complete the task as safely as possible.
Part of a health and safety procedure may be policies on how to complete the specific instructions but a procedure and a policy are 2 different things in the end.
Health and Safety Policy Statement
This is a fairly general statement about the commitment a company has about health and safety in their operations. It is fairly general in that it is mostly a set of goals made to keep workers and customers safe with somewhat vague guidelines to how these goals will be achieved. The statement itself does not necessarily explain how to perform any specific task; it does not describe a specific rule such as workers must wear a hard hat. This is a general statement or set of policies made to verify a companies committment to safety and following the underying legislation that applies.
This does not mean a health and safety policy statement is not important. In fact, this health and safety policy statement, in general, is the policy that is legislated as a requirement under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, s.25(2)(j).
This is where a lot of confusion comes in.
- The laws use the term “health and safety policy” as well as more indirectly “health and safety program”.
- A more accurate terminology would be “health and safety policy statement” and “health and safety program”
- To make things more confusing, in many cases when people discss these doscuments the term “health and safety policy” is used to refer to the collection of both, the health and safety policy (statement) and the health and safety program.
So, what is a health and safety program then?
Health and Safety Program
A health and safety program is the larger encompassing set of documents that contains all the company health and safety policies, procedures, practices, plans, and other documentation in place to keep workers safe. It is a set of documentation meant to describe all the overall safety initiatives throughout a company and allow any worker to do any task they may come up against in the safest way possible.
So what does it all mean and how does it all fit together?
Fitting Them Together
The structure ends up working something like this:
A company has a health and safety policy statement that describes the overall goals for safety within that company.
The company has a health and safety program that contains all the information and documentation required to satisfy the goals made in the health and safety policy statement.
That health and safety program is made up of different health and safety policies procedures and other documents that help workers complete their job safely.
All of these health and safety policies and procedures must be reviewed on a yearly basis as described by the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
Don’t worry if it all still seems confusing. Your job is to keep your business running, our job is to manage the health and safety. Contact us today to see how our professonals can help you with your health and safety policy review.
