Douglas Adams school of safety

We had our Health and Safety; Implications for Directors free seminar last week, which was very interesting indeed. My guest speaker was Don Graham (JP), who certainly gripped the audience with tales of directors in all manner of peril, simply by not taking health and safety seriously at board level. You would think that the very real prospect of going to jail, or losing your personal assets (just 2 of the real-life stories from Don), would motivate board's across the land to jump out of their seats and empower safety teams to get cracking on protecting their rear ends.

One of our employees is a huge fan of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and loves a quote from Arthur Dent, who proudly proclaimed "I'd far rather be happy than right any day". This phrase has been changed a little in our organisation now, and it goes something like this: "It's a shame that people often confuse being lucky with being right". We use this to apply to some of the stories we hear in the health and safety world and it wasn't until last week's seminar that it came crashing down on me as to the full implications of this little saying.


Of course, those words apply to so many things in life, but for safety, the ramifications are huge. Just because nothing has gone wrong so far, really doesn't mean that everything is all right. There are so many preventable accidents and injuries, just waiting to happen in the workplace today, not to mention the more insidious injuries like vibration white finger or noise induced deafness! Being lucky to get away with it certainly isn't the same as getting to grips and getting it right!