Guide to health and safety

The 22-page booklet, Little Book of Big Ideas, has been written by RoSPA’s occupational safety and health policy adviser and immediate past president of IOSH, Dr Karen McDonnell, together with RoSPA’s partnership consultant Roger Bibbings. It is available for download now.

The booklet is designed to aid understanding of the increasingly complex and debated ideas at the heart of occupational health and safety, and can be used as a gateway to further reading, a handy reference guide to remind about essential terms and concepts, or as a resource to support teaching.

It can be used to help experts and non-experts alike, to refresh knowledge and understanding, and seeks to enable the reader to answer questions such as 'when, where, how, why, and to whom do accidents happen?' and 'what do we mean by risk and how do we assess it?'

Karen McDonnell said: “The RoSPA principle of ‘as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible’ is underpinned by those commonly-used but sometimes misunderstood terms including hazard, risk, probability, and preventability. Anyone attending a health and safety training course or reading guidance material will routinely hear the words used and often engage in debate on their meaning and applicability.

“For this reason RoSPA has produced the Little Book of Big Ideas: a ready-reckoner, a quick recap or a step into new topics. As a practitioner you can use its content to dispel health and safety myths.”

The booklet is available as a free download from: http://www.rospa.com/occupational-safety/advice/little-book-of-big-ideas