Health Shield has extended its newly launched occupational health platform to include home-working, returning from furlough and onsite risk surveillance assessments.
It says there is a need for intermediaries to focus on employers’ ‘duty of care’ responsibilities, which may have taken a back seat over the last year. Due to changing work patters it says intermediaries and employers may need to widen their scope of wellbeing in the workplace.
The three new questionnaires, which are offered on a pay-as-you-go basis and provide employers with an inbuilt audit trail, include the following:
- Working from home. This focuses on areas such as workstation assessments, eye health, fire safety, electrical equipment safety, manual handling, accidents / first aid and slips, trips and falls.
- Returning from furlough. This helps identify any ‘new’ mental health conditions and also asks about existing conditions. It looks at work life balance, potential issues caused by a return to the workplace (i.e. childcare, eldercare), whether the individual is self-isolating, what contact they’ve had with the employer and whether health and safety procedures on return are clear.
- Covid-19. This provides an assessment of individuals and household members, with regards to any test results taken and symptoms.
The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) states that employers have a legal duty to protect employees from harm by completing risk assessments and acting on the findings. For homeworkers these risks include: lone working without supervision, working with display screen equipment (DSE), stress and mental health.
Much of the guidance applies whether employees are working from home on a temporary or permanent basis. But where Display Screen Equipment (DSE) assessments are concerned, the requirement to carry out home workstation assessments and provide people with appropriate equipment and advice on control measures only applies where people are working at home on a “long-term” basis.**
Health Shield head of marketing Jennie Doyle says: “There is no definition on the HSE website of ‘long-term’ when it comes to working from home.
“The HSE was lenient around carrying out homeworker risk assessments last year during the shift to mass homeworking, as it was considered a temporary move. But it’s now over a year since the start of the first lockdown. Homeworking is looking like a permanent feature for some.
“The shift for others back to workplaces – in whole or part – along with furlough ending in September, will put pressure on organisations of all shapes and sizes to assess risk and put in place suitable control measures. Responsible employers will want to do what they consider to be right, regardless of a clear edict.”
Health Shield also offers wellbeing services, offering a range of additional services such as virtual GPs, counselling helplines and physio triage. Doyle says these can be used as risk mitigation measures on the back of OH assessments and to to help nurture a culture of self-care and proactive absence management.
