HND Health and Social Care Management
HEALTH AND SAFETY IN HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE WORKPLACE
John Egharevba
This essay is about how health and safety is applied in health and social care in order to protect everyone in health and social care environment, and it will also examine the importance of health and safety policy and risk assessment in workplace. Health and Safety at work etc Act 1974 is concern with maintaining and improving the physical and mental well-being of employees at work and protecting anyone else who may be adversely affected. Care homes are therefore subject to the provision of health and safety policy, employers and employees have defined duties to ensure the health and safety of themselves, service users, visitors and contractors (HSE, 2001).
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In health and social care organisation, there are different systems put in place for communicating information e.g. risk assessment, infection control system, machinery system, first aid system, environmental control system, medication control system and training. Employers must have a health and safety poster as a sign of communicating health and safety at workplace, the fire exit signs must be visible to everyone in case of emergency, and is another way of communicating health and safety and there should be signs of warning, caution, wet floor, infection bin etc (Shranks 2012). A risk assessment is the investigation and identification of the likelihood of an undesired outcome or incident happening. Risk is anything that is likely to cause hazard or have the probability to cause harm, while hazard is anything that have the potential of causing harm(Nolan, 2009). In a workplace, in other to carry out risk assessment, we must first identify the hazard, decide who might be harm and how, evaluate the risk and decide on precautions, record findings and implement them. Review your assessment and update if necessary
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