April 28 is World Day for Safety and Health at Work, aiming to promote a positive safety and health culture in the workplace to help reduce the number of work-related injuries.
Safety is at the heart of everything we do at Chemring. Across our organisation our goal is zero harm, not as a statistical target but as a moral imperative. We call this our Journey to Zero Harm, which will be achieved by establishing a strong proactive safety culture.
Last year, we launched our Fundamental Safety Principles as part of our Journey to Zero Harm. These principles are the minimum expectations concerning People, Plant, and Processes. They apply to everyone working for or on a Chemring-controlled site, and everyone is expected to understand and apply these rules within their working environment.
Illustrated safety scenarios
The core aim of the Fundamental Safety Principles is to create a culture in which people feel empowered to stop others if they feel something is unsafe. The key to this is providing safety training and engaging communications materials tailored to issues here at Chemring. To do this, we have created a series of targeted safety scenarios using illustrations.
The safety scenarios are based on actual events that have occurred or have been reported to prevent incidents. The scenarios are used as posters or situations in training or toolbox talks. They have been created dynamically, and visually demonstrate how an unsafe condition can lead to a dangerous act, a near miss, and, ultimately, an accident.
These illustrated scenarios are refreshed every quarter and displayed and used across all Chemring locations to share learnings and highlight hazard hot spots.
Says Steve Messam, Chemring’s Group Health, Safety & Environment Director, “We want everyone across Chemring to continue to feel comfortable and able to challenge if they see something that is unsafe or could potentially cause harm. That’s how we’ll continue moving forward and creating a proactive safety culture across our organisation.”