Safety Training

Shopping Bag 0

Employers Beware: COVID-19 and Remote Working Obligations

Employers Beware: COVID-19 and Remote Working Obligations

The Safety Health and Welfare at Work legislation boils down to the fact that Employers are obliged to provide a safe place to work.

There are significant sanctions for employers who breach the legislation including fines up to €3 million and imprisonment for up to 2 years for a serious breach. In 2019 in HSA v Walker the defendant was prosecuted for a breach of s11(1)(c)(ii) of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 and sentenced to 6 months with only 2 month suspended.

In these COVID 19 times a workplace can mean working from home for many employees. Employers have a duty therefore to check that their employees have the appropriate facilities and equipment to work safely. The big difference now is that people working from home are doing so for their  full working day or at least a large part of their working hours. Appropriate desk, chair and work station ergonomics need to be considered. How do you keep in touch with your staff to check on their well-being? Is there inappropriate online activity? How is everyone’s mental health holding up? These are just a few of the considerations that you need to consider and find ways of dealing with issues that were previously dealt with in the office environment.

 

“Having a designated COVID-19 Compliance Officer within the workplace

is looking like becoming the new norm.”

 

Employer Obligations: Workplace Health and Safety

Having a designated COVID-19 Compliance Officer within the workplace is looking like becoming the new norm. This person or persons will be tasked with ensuring businesses meet any instructions or rules issued by the Government in order to allow them to continue trading. Online training, health and safety awareness and carrying out up to date risk assessments can be implemented easily and at low cost. A simple example is asking your employees to send a photo of their workstation. This can then be reviewed by an appropriate qualified person to assess its suitability. Creating appropriate checklists and procedures can help employers and employees assess what needs to be done in everyone’s best interests.

 

Myelearnsafety.com provides a range of courses and our experts are on hand to give advice and courses to suit your business helping you create a better safer workplace in a changed pandemic world and helping you meet your legal requirements to provide a safe place of work.

5 Ways Mindfulness Practice Positively Changes Your Brain

In recent years mindfulness has become a buzzword in neuroscience, and mental health fields. Over thirty years of research has found that mindfulness practice, mindfulness meditation and mindfulness based stress reduction shares a symmetry  with mental, physical and emotional health. Some of the benefits of mindfulness practice include the following: 

 

 

There are essentially five ways in which mindfulness practice positively changes your brain. 

 

Frontal  Cortex

 

Mindful states achieve through meditation, meditation training, mindfulness based stress reduction training and mindfulness practice boost frontal brain activity. Over time this increased cortical strengthening bolsters our capacity for rational  thought and intentional planning which promotes great emotional awareness and control and executive functioning. 

 

Amygdala

Mindfulness practice and mindfulness training helps reduce grey matter and activity in the amygdala (a roughly almond-shaped mass of grey matter inside each cerebral hemisphere, involved with the experiencing of emotions). This helps reduce feelings of fear and anxiety and promotes physiological well-being and calmness. 

 

Social Neural Circuitry

There’s a strong correlation between relationship practice and mindfulness practice. Mindfulness has been found to play a vital role in establishing and maintaining emotionally nourishing relationships. 

 

Mindfulness practice also impacts the hippocampus positively, helping us to better remember and lead to greater cognitive functioning. 

 

Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Mindfulness practice increases one’s attention levels and  enhances emotional control. With the online world constantly vying for our attention this can have a great benefit to us. 

 

Insula 

The insula controls the internal sense of the body, “gut” feelings and responses. This region is associated with how we perceive ourselves physically. The ability 

 

In his article,  Linder concludes that the ability of (mindfulness practice) to increase the thickness of your brain and protect against normal age-related brain thinning linked to dementia, in itself, is an especially compelling reason to practice (Linder, 2019). 

 

Why not put this into practice yourself and experience the fantastic benefits of mindfulness practice at https://myelearnsafety.com/product/mindfulness-practice/

 

Safeguarding of Vulnerable Adults

Vulnerable adults are those who are restricted in capacity to guard themselves against harm or exploitation. All persons have the right to be safe and to live a life free from abuse and/or neglect, regardless of their circumstances of gender, age etc.  The term ‘safeguarding’ in the context of these standards means putting measures in place in services to reduce the risk of harm, to promote people’s human rights, health and wellbeing, and empowering people to protect themselves.

Elder abuse defined

Elder Abuse is defined as a single or repeated act, or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship where there is an expectation of trust which causes harm or distress to an older person or violates their human and civil rights. (Protecting our Future, Report of the Working Group on Elder Abuse, September 2002). Sixty five years of age is taken as the point beyond which abuse may be considered to be elder abuse.

Source – Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection 

The HSE Health Act Regulations

Health Act Regulations, 2013. This policy applies to older persons or persons with a disability that, as a result of physical or intellectual impairment, may be at risk of abuse. The person may be in receipt of a care service in his or her own home, in the community or be resident in a residential care home, nursing home or other setting. Equally, the person may not be in receipt of a care service.

Some of the principles underpinning the policy include:

Source – HSE 

Types of abuse

 

World Elder Abuse Day

On the 15th of this month (June 2019) it was World Elder Abuse Day. This day was first introduced back in 2006 and it was to bring attention to the issue of elder abuse in our global society and as a public health and humans rights concern.

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day provides an opportunity for all of us to focus our attention on elder abuse. It challenges each one of us to redouble efforts to promote respect and dignity for all older people and to help eradicate abuse of older people. Everybody has a role to play and the challenges posed by elder abuse cannot be met solely by any one individual, organisation, or state body, it is all our responsibilities.

 

Safeguarding of Vulnerable Adults Course

We at MyElearnSafety want to be part of the solution to this type of abuse so we are created a Safeguarding of Vulnerable Adults Course . This course will enable service users to understand fully what safeguarding a vulnerable adult entails: What is  a vulnerable adult? What constitutes abuse? How to respond to signs of abuse; How to respond to concerns of an elderly person who may have suffered abused.

Our ‘Safeguarding of Vulnerable Adults’ course is approved by the Irish Association of Healthcare Assistants (IAHA).

Construction Site Safety Best Practices

Construction Site Safety

Assess the risks

Slip, trips and falls

According to OSHA, falls are the leading cause of death in construction. Think about the exposed high-rise buildings or buildings with scaffolding around them. Even falls from ladders cause a significant amount of on-the-job industries. Injuries occur when workers do not install scaffolds securely or use ladders incorrectly which is the leading cause of accidents.

 

Hazardous materials/ Chemicals

A concerning rising safety hazard in the construction industry is the mishandling and misuse of hazardous materials.

The use of hazardous materials and chemicals is commonly identified as a key hazard in manufacturing industries but can often be overlooked in construction. Perhaps unknowingly, construction workers are handling, using and emitting hazardous materials every day on site.

Access all hazardous materials and Chemicals that will be on the construction site before the work begins and make sure the workers know the safety procedures around them.  For more information on how you can educate your employees on hazardous materials and chemicals please click here.

 

Electrocution

Electricity is one of the great inventions of the past century, but there’s no getting around the fact that it can be extremely dangerous if it’s not handled properly. Any construction site has the potential to expose construction workers to electricity. Many tools and pieces of equipment require electricity to operate. This is why it’s so critical for any type of construction worker to receive appropriate safety training for the use of electricity on a job site.

It’s also important for construction workers to have access to appropriate safety gear and equipment if they are required to work with or around electricity.

 

Heavy and/or powerful tools

The greatest hazards posed by hand tools result from misuse and improper maintenance. The employer is responsible for the safe condition of tools and equipment used by employees. Employers shall not issue or permit the use of unsafe hand tools. Employees should be trained in the proper use and handling of tools and equipment.

These tools also often cause hand-arm vibration. According to the HSE; By law, as an employer, you must assess and identify measures to eliminate or reduce risks from exposure to hand-arm vibration so that you can protect your employees from risks to their health.

 

Mental Heath

Dermot Carey, Director Safety and Training, Construction Industry Federation (CIF) said;

“Research shows that 10 people a week in Ireland take their own lives – 8 out of these ten are men. The construction sector is 96% male. We know from feedback we have received that workers in the construction sector are part of these statistics. As an industry we have focussed a lot of our effort in the past at managing safety issues – recently we have realised that we need to give time to managing people’s wellbeing…. the slogan for the day is “ Mind Your Head”. 

For more information on how you can educate your employees on Mental Health please click here.

 

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

The fundamental principle is that personal protective equipment (PPE) should only be used as a last resort. The safety and health of employees must be first safeguarded by measures to eliminate workplace risks at source, through technical or organisational means (e.g by substituting hazardous chemical ) or by providing protection on a collective basis (e.g providing scaffolding instead of harnesses).

The employer has to make an assessment of the hazards in the workplace in order to identify the correct type of PPE to be provided and to ensure that PPE is appropriate to the risk. Care must be taken in selecting PPE as certain types give reasonably high levels of protection while others,  that may appear almost the same, give relatively low levels of protection. Source – Health and Safety Authority

 

If you would any further information on how you can be more safe or have questions please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us either by mailing Shane@elearn.ie or calling Tel +353 1 693 1421.