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Having a Health and Safety Policy and annual objectives in place is key to helping your department set its intent and goals for the year.
What is a health and safety policy?
The UCL Health and Safety Policy sets out your general approach to health and safety. It explains how you, as an employer, will manage health and safety in your department. It should clearly state who does what, when and how. For T100 Lite, the Head of Department is required to produce a 'statement of commitment' which can be brief and refer to the overarching UCL policy and procedures. The statement should emphasise:
- The importance of maintaining a healthy and safe working environment within the department.
- The need to comply with the overarching UCL Health and Safety Policy and also the Departmental Occupational Health and Safety Arrangements.
- Heads of Department should express their personal commitment to the health, safety and welfare of staff and to enforcing these arrangements.
Occupational health and safety arrangements
The arrangements describe how a department carries out its health and safety management. It must be authorised by senior management, such as by a signature, and be available to staff, such as on a website, shared drive, or in hard copy. Staff must be aware that the arrangements exist and where they can find them.
Example of Arrangements
You should consider the arrangements you have in place for the risks that your department faces. For example, you should have arrangements in place for the following:
- How safety issues are escalated to senior staff and how they are disseminated to all staff.
- How the department expects visitors and contractors to communicate before undertaking activities.
- How inductions are carried out and recorded.
- How staff are expected to carry out, assess and approve risk assessments.
- How inspections are carried out, by whom, how often, how actions are allocated, completed and how they are recorded.
- How staff are expected to carry out DSE (workstation) assessments.
- How to report incidents, accidents and near misses.
- How to find departmental emergency plans.
- How the arrangements are reviewed annually and any changes carried out.
Planning for safety
You must have a plan in place for the implementation of UCL's safety objectives. You should refer to the UCL corporate objectives that are relevant to the department and, in addition, choose objectives that might be important to the department.
All the objectives must be monitored and tracked regularly with appropriate actions set and allocated with timescales, and then closed out when complete. It is good practice to ensure that objectives are SMART, which means they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. This is called the 'departmental safety plan'.
> UCL Safety objectives 2021/22
Example of local departmental objectives INFO REQUIRED
