Barriers that retard the Improvement of Health and Safety
Promoting health and safety is the obligation of every personnel in the health and safety industry. There are several potential barriers to promoting good standards of Health and Safety due to which organizations might not be able to achieve or maintain safety goals or performance standards. Due to failure in achieving good standards of health and safety, accident rates might increase. While on the other hand, an accident maybe becomes uncontrollable.
Below are major barriers that affect the promotion of health and safety.
1. A tedious Workplace
A lot of organizations consist of various people from different backgrounds, with different and at times absurd schools of thought. Sometimes workplaces are complex in nature, that means several people doing several different activities at the same time in the same place. In this case, it might be difficult to maintain good standards of health and safety for every person or activity. The more the number, the harder it is to put things into orderliness except when guidelines are being laid down.
2. A complicated Encounter
People or individuals at times find themselves in complicated or complex situations which make standard decisions difficult to make. There are times when we encounter complicated or complex health and safety issues or problems. Some corrections to certain problems are straightforward and for some issues, several courses of actions are available with different good and bad outcomes. So lack of competence might become another barrier in promoting good standards of health and safety and wrong selection of a solution might result in increased number of accidents.
3. Conflict of premeditated and un- premeditated actions
Employers often or most of the time put employees in-between in making a decision which ends up leading to conflict of demand in action making. A typical example is demand to increase the supply of a product or service by speeding up the process so as to make a profit’ or ‘to do so safely’.
Situation like this does not only interface with safety priority but also have a significant effect on the result required. So the conflict of demand becomes a barrier in maintaining good standards of health and safety and may cause accident rates to increase.
4. Enforcement Agencies and abilities
In most of the countries, there is no enforcement agency for the health and safety laws implementation. Even if it exists in any country, then health and safety standards of the companies are influenced by a number of inspectors, their legal mandates, punishments for breaches and competency of inspectors. Absence or poor control of such agencies might become a barrier in achieving national safety goals of improved standards at workplaces.
5. Inadequate or lack of management commitment to safety
Every organization or employer of safety workers must at all time be committed to the priority of safety. If management commits to bringing improvement in the health and safety standards at the workplace in policy but doesn’t give it a priority and does not demonstrate its commitment by visible leadership, then safety culture will deteriorate dramatically and morale of workers decline resulting in increasing number of accidents and become a barrier in maintaining good standards of health and safety.
Improvement in the health and safety industry must be consistent and ongoing. Individual workers, both employers and employees must make it a priority to check out the above-mentioned barrier if excellent improvement is what they need to aim at.
