One event, many topics
February 1st 2006 In the ever-changing world of health and safety, keeping up-todate with the latest information and regulations can be a major headache for professionals. Ignorance is no excuse if something goes wrong, but finding the right source of suitable knowledge can be extremely time-consuming. To relieve the pressure, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has come up with a new approach
While there is still great demand for RoSPA's major occupational health and safety congresses and for the specialist seminars it has developed in recent years, the Society realised that many safety professionals were looking for a more flexible way to gather the information they needed by attending one event and concentrating only on the issues that concerned them.
According to Diane Preece, events manager, there was a need for a fresh approach. She says "Health and safety professionals are not only our valued customers, but also support RoSPA in many ways, often through becoming one of our members. We need to be sure we give them exactly what they want and so we began considering formats which would meet their requirements as fully as possible.
"The solution, we believed, lay in allowing customers to choose their own programme. The challenge was finding a way for people with diverse interests to attend one event and all come away satisfied.
"We felt the best starting point was to provide discussion tables led by experts on specialist topics. The plan was to let people join or leave the discussion whenever they wanted so that they could move on to another subject as soon as they had gleaned the information they needed. RoSPA's own experts were convinced it would work and when we approached specialist organisations and businesses to lead some of the discussions, they were keen to come on board - and even to offer sponsorship to ensure the event's success."
The first RoSPA Safety Awareness Exchange was at the Hinckley Island Hotel, Leicestershire, in December and featured 16 discussion tables. Topics covered included: the safe learner strategy; workforce involvement; behavioural safety; new fire risk assessment legislation; new noise legislation; updated construction design and management regulations; hand arm vibration legislation; skin disease; working at height; site transport safety; manual handling/musculoskeletal disorders; occupational road risk; slips, trips and falls; electrical safety; PPE selection; and machinery and work equipment assessments.
To add value, it was decided to also offer more formal presentations on corporate performance reporting, directors' duties, developments in management systems auditing and rehabilitation and return to work. These could be workshop-style if preferred, and there was no obligation to stay for the entire presentation if a delegate wanted to switch back to the discussion tables or to another presentation running at the same time.
The final touch, which was to prove extremely popular, was to add 'early bird' briefings for those arriving before the main programme began. These covered the 'sensible safety' debate, developments in return-to-work and rehabilitation policies, corporate manslaughter and organisational readiness to investigate.
The extensive list of topics and the opportunity to dip in and out of any of the sessions had immediate appeal.
Diane Preece comments "Busy professionals welcomed the fact that they didn't have to waste valuable time sitting through issues which did not affect them. The rolling sessions allowed them to keep pace with key developments in their field while also sharing and comparing information with others."
Following the success of its first event, RoSPA Safety Awareness Exchanges will be held at the Majestic Hotel, Harrogate, on 6th March and at the Hilton Hotel, Watford, on the 27th March. These events will include a special focus on managing occupational road risk, with a series of sessions sponsored by Toyota GB. More articles from RoSPA: | 
