What is the role of H&S practitioner? Which regulation contains information about the role of H&S Practitioner?

Independent, competent (by virtue of skill, knowledge, education and training) professional to promote health and safety without involving into any other function within the Organisation is the key role of health and safety practitioner. Many industries appoint safety professional for compliance purpose and leave all safety related matters of the organisation on him. That is really sad because H&S practitioner is advisory role and he should advise the line team, management on below matters rather than performing line team responsibility in managing health and safety:

1-      Advise on Risk management (Identification of hazard, risk assessment and control measures following hierarchy .i.e. Elimination, Substitution, Engineering, Administrative and PPE).

2-      Health and Safety Training to all concerned. Technical trainings like Electrical safety etc. should be provided by line team including electrical department in this case.

3-      Advise on legal requirements based on the local, national and international in case of overseas work. Compliance requirements of legal requirements.

4-      Advise and suggest Management programmes & objectives for Health and safety.

5-      Advise on Emergency management method, Mock drills coordination with emergency team.

6-      Advise on Formulation of standard operating procedures, work instructions.

7-      Advise on selection of personal protection equipments.

8-      Investigation of incidents including near miss, first aid, lost time injuries, fatality etc.

9-      Workplace inspection.

10-   Monitoring the H&S performance with line team.

11-   Monitoring leading and lagging indicators of health and safety.

12-   Compliance of Safety committee meeting

Similar many more other tasks are there for H&S practitioner.

It is obviously not true that H&S practitioner is solely responsible for managing health and safety within the organisation. Make it for sure that he should be only work as a advisory role and never perform line time job.

Regulations which cover Health and Safety practitioner roles are as below:

Regulation 7 of “The management of Health and Safety at work” regulation- Appointment of H&S practitioner and assistance in tasks similar as mentioned above. Cooperation provision by management to H&S practitioner etc.

HSE publication “Successful health and safety management” describes roles of health and safety practitioner.

So obviously it is true that organisation has to appoint competent and independent role base health and safety practitioner.

www.hse.gov.uk