Be a health and safety consultant, no apparent experience necessary?

Sensible personal protection at work is always a good thing,
I endorse a sensible and common sense approach

How many times have you seen someone working in civil engineering in the street cutting a paving slab with no air mask, no ear or eye protection, as clouds of fine silica dust billow around them and the public? Too many!

We often hear ridiculous 'nanny state' stories about over the top health and safety, but what do you need to be qualified to advise? Nothing it would seem, take this example I observed in a previous job.

I worked for a small paint company, it bought in a base product and tinted it to colour, no different from a number of companies.

Well, one day they had a contact from a health and safety consultant. The consultant came and she observed the operation and gave recommendations.

I was very disturbed to see that it was obviously apparent that this person seemed to completely miss the very obvious glaring to me, issues.

Now, in my past I have worked spraying paints, in vehicle restoration and working with media blasting to clean off metals, I take sensible safety precautions with personal safety because I am aware of the dangers. I take proportional risk because I observe proportional and sufficient safety - I call it the common sense approach, it works.

So let us discuss the case I outlined. The mixing area for the paints was separated from the admin office where around 10 people worked, by a four foot corridor and two doors, both of which were almost permanently open.

As a result, paint and solvent fumes could be smelt in the admin office. Wrong.

The paint mixing room being a manufacturing area did not have any signs prohibiting members of the public from entry. Wrong.

In the mixing room, a ventilator extraction fan was in the wrong place and was not used. There was no viable fume extraction means in that small room. Wrong.

The company (I pointed out to both the Directors) did not obtain from the paint base suppliers, any medical information on how to treat ingress of their various products into the eye or onto the skin etc. There were no eyewash stations in the room nor any first aid procedure specific to treating the accident relating to the paints or rehearsed procedure to deal with any accident. The Consultant missed this. Wrong.

None of the 3 paint room staff wore safety shoes, one was an apprentice of 17, who was frequently handling 5 litre tins of heavy base product. At my suggestion, he did get supplied with a pair of safety trainers.

It was a start, but the Consultant did not pick up on this. This came from me and my concerns. The mixing staff did not wear barrier cream and rarely vinyl type gloves.

There was no fire drill, there were extinguishers, but I don't think anyone in the office had been trained to use them. There was apparently no chemical symbols on display for the fire service to see in case of a fire, nor were the fire service to my knowledge aware of chemicals on site in bulk quantities including solvents. Again, the Consultant did not identify this. Wrong.

So you can see the potential here for a dangerous situation. As a result of complaints from the admin office where I worked in Sales, one Friday afternoon, I was unable to concentrate and had to go out of the office due to the prevalent solvent fumes.

And others in the office did complain as well. This solvent was discontinued with but the problem should never have arisen in the first place, had proper practice and observation by the Consultant been made and implemented. Wrong.

Now I am not saying go over the top, but the company could have saved the fee of this useless Consultant by asking the staff. I actually identified the above concerns without having been a safety consultant, just because I had common sense and practical experience.

I would suggest that the advice report the Consultant gave to the company was not worth wiping your arse with, but costly into the bargain. I often wonder what would have been the outcome had an accident happened and been investigated.  

The 'I told you so' comment from me would be little consolation. But then again, why would a company listen to someone like me with real practical experience, when they can buy it in from someone with a letter head and a business card who claims to be proficient?

So there you have it, become a consultant with no risk, it would seem.