It’s a sad fact that paperwork and health and safety compliance often go hand in hand, and if a business happens to be a large industrial operation across multiple sites, this can mean an enormous amount of paperwork.
If the site happens to be complex, high-risk or spread across the globe, the necessary documentation – management systems and records – can also be highly technical; any business with multiple policies, safe working procedures, standards and process flows can very quickly find itself with multiple authors, inconsistency, use of jargon, erratic formatting and confusing terminology. This is a fate that can easily befall all businesses, no matter what their size or sector.
This is when a second pair of eyes can become incredibly useful, and this is a role that Santia has been happy to fulfil for various clients. Technical editing of health and safety documents not only ensures consistency of style across large quantities of paperwork, it will also help to make those documents meaningful, easy to read and flow logically so that they are more than just paperwork. If policies and procedures are to be read and followed by people at every level within a business, they must be clear, unambiguous and correct; by filtering them through an impartial and informed resource, this is easily achievable - and a service that Santia is able to offer. This is important not only for newly developed systems, but equally as important for existing systems which are not seen as effective.
For some businesses, the vastness of their health and safety management systems can prevent them from carrying out this sense-checking process, but given how easy it is for errors to creep in as changes are made, it’s vital that these documents are properly reviewed. Careful use of language can prevent misunderstandings and improve the chances of procedures being properly adhered to; an achievement that all health and safety managers are working to achieve every day.
Santia sets such high value on the checking of documents for technical content and style, that it carries out this function on many of the reports for health, safety and environmental projects that it undertakes.
It is only with this level of rigour that a consistency of approach can be achieved and systems streamlined without increasing risk.
With erisk, Santia’s online health and safety management system, the full range of disciplines relating to health and safety, including fire safety through to the management of asbestos, environmental control and occupational health are clearly presented on one screen.