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In Brief
NO CHANGE TO DIRECTORS' DUTIES
The HSE Board has approved a paper which recommends that there should be no additional health and safety legislation requirements for directors. Instead the key focus of activity in this area will be to:
SCOTTISH HEALTH AND SAFETY ENQUIRY The Scottish Affairs Select Committee is examining health and safety in Scotland. Particular aspects for consideration include:
www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/scottish-affairs-committee/news/hse-terms-of-reference/ HSE DELIVERY PLAN 2011/12 The HSE has issued its delivery plan for the next year. Much of its contents have been already announced, or are contained within the Young report. Other items of interest include:
STRESS INCREASE Eurofound's ‘Foundation Focus' suggests that work-related stress is on the increase as a result of complex organisational decision-making, and argues that stress is not caused by work alone, but by conflicting demands on people, both in their working and non-working lives. For Europeans, work intensity has increased over the past 20 years - more workers work at high speed, work to tight deadlines, or have their pace of work driven by more demands. In the EU27, nearly 60 per cent of workers say that that they have to work at very high speed for at least a quarter of their working time. By reducing the physical strain of work as well as the stress caused by the intensity of work, workers are more likely to stay in their jobs longer. The ‘Foundation Focus' also offers a snapshot of workers' attitudes towards ageing and training in the workplace, taken from the latest edition of the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS 2010). The new Foundation Focus is available at http://bit.ly/hWhLxn CONSTRUCTION SITE DIRECTIVE GUIDANCE The European Commission has released a non-binding guide to understanding and implementing Directive 92/57/EEC on the implementation of minimum safety and health requirements at temporary or mobile construction sites (implemented in the UK by the ‘CDM' Regulations 2007). The guide aims to assist all parties involved in construction to understand and implement the provisions of the Directive. The Commission's guide can be found at: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=716&langId=en&intPageId=219SO GOOD YOU GOT IT TWICE Subscribers may have thought Groundhog Day had come last month when a printer error led to the March issue being printed instead of the April issue. We apologise for the resulting slight delay in delivery of the April issue. US ASBESTOS ROADMAP The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has published its recommended framework for a national research strategy to address current scientific uncertainties about occupational exposure and toxicity issues relating to asbestos fibres and other elongate mineral particles. NIOSH says many scientific uncertainties remain on the health risks associated with exposure to other elongate mineral particles, including those with mineralogical compositions identical or similar to the asbestos minerals and those that have already been documented to cause asbestos-like disease, as well as the physical and chemical characteristics that determine toxicity Priority areas for research, as proposed by the roadmap, include:
BUSINESS CONTINUITY SURVEY Organisations are not learning from previous disruptions according to a survey of business continuity management (BCM) published by the Chartered Management Institute. Other findings include:
NEW WASTE REGULATIONS IN FORCE As flagged up in last month's ‘Monitor', the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 have begun to replace the Environmental Protection (Duty of Care) Regulations 1991 in England and Wales, and to amend the Hazardous Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2005. New requirements from 29 March 2011 include a new hazardous property (‘H13: sensitising'). Further changes will come in on 28 September 2011, notably the need to apply the ‘waste hierarchy' (which starts with waste elimination and goes down to disposal in landfill) when waste is transferred. For more information visit the Environment Agency website at: www.environment-agency.gov.uk/business/regulation/128153.aspx or view the new Regulations at: www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/988/contents/made WORK CAN BE BAD FOR YOU A study published in ‘Occupational and Environmental Medicine' suggests that while good quality jobs deliver health benefits, bad jobs can leave people in a worse state of health than remaining unemployed. The study concludes that while overall the unemployed had poorer mental health than those who were employed, "the mental health of those who were unemployed was comparable or superior to those in jobs of the poorest psychosocial quality". The Australian research team say their findings show: "The health benefits of becoming employed were dependent on the quality of the job. Moving from unemployment into a high quality job led to improved mental health. . .however the transition from unemployment to a poor quality job was more detrimental to mental health than remaining unemployed". P Butterworth, LS Leach, L Strazdins, SC Olesen, B Rodgers and DH Broom. ‘The psychosocial quality of work determines whether employment has benefits for mental health: results from a longitudinal national household panel survey', ‘Occupational and Environmental Medicine', Online First, 14 March 2011, doi10.1136/oem.2010.059030. Abstract available from: http://oem.bmj.com/content/early/2011/02/26/oem.2010.059030.abstract |
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