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Memo M7/17

health and safety self assurance questionnaire - 2017

Heads of departments are expected to satisfy themselves each year that the health and safety arrangements within their departments meet the requirements of University policy statements. To help heads of department do this, the University releases a health and safety self-assurancequestionnaire every two years. The latest questionnaire is now available.

Departmental safety officers should have received a separate email describing how to access the toolkit. If you have not received an email, as expected, please email the University Safety Office:

Departments are asked to submit the completed questionnaire by 30th November 2017.

Heads of department are responsible for ensuring the questionnaire is completed within this timescale. However, it is assumed that departmental safety officers (DSO) will be nominated to undertake the review, complete the questionnaire and submit this to their head of department for approval. If someone other than the DSO is going to complete the questionnaire, please notify the University Safety Office. Once the head of department has approved their questionnaire, it will be forwarded to the University Safety Office.

The toolkitshould provide an indication of effective health and safety management systems within the department and help identify where improvements might be required. Departments are expected to use these findings to plan and develop ways of implementing improvements. Departments may therefore wish to consult their departmental safety advisory committees, area safety officers, and the University Safety Office for advice.

The 2017 questionnaire is based upon the University’s HASMAP audit indicators (See University policy statement S1/11) and follows a similarformat to previous questionnaires. The only significant change is that the questionnaire is now hosted on the University Safety Office’s SharePoint site:

You are asked to consider the department’s current health and safety management systems against the performance statements outlined in the questionnaire and then select the most appropriate statement. You are then asked to provide the following documents as supporting evidence:

-Statement of safety organisation

-Fire risk assessment

-Agenda and minutes from the departmental safety advisory committees (or equivalent)

-Inspection reports

-​A summary of the accidents reported within the past two years

To help you identify possible improvements, the questionnaire also includes a series of Feedback Questions in each section. This should prompt further consideration of the health and safety management system, as well as providing useful information to the University to help develop policies and support.

The 2017 questionnaire includes a key topic question (Q.9), this time on Health Monitoring. Here the section includes a series of ‘Yes / No / NA’ questions which reflect the requirements of University policy. Again, the questions should help departments review their current arrangements. The key purpose though is to gather information to help the University develop its health monitoring programmes, such as health surveillance and noise/vibration measurements.

Finally, each section has an open text box for recording areas for improvement. This should be used to outline/bullet point those areas that the department feels should be developed over the next year or two. The text box can also be used to record specific questions for the Safety Office or feedback additional comments or suggestions.

The exercise is ultimately aimed at supporting departments, but the anonymised results will be used to monitor the University’s overall performance. The results will not be used to rank departments in any way. A summary report from the 2013 and 2015 exercise is available from the following website.

To help those completing thequestionnaire, a training course is available on the 4th October, 2017. Full details of this course are included in the above website, as well as a link within the toolkit itself.

If there any questions, please contact theUniversity Safety Office: .

27September 2017B Jenkins

CIRC: A, C, H, O, S, Heads, DSOs1, DSOs2, Admins, List V