Project H&S management plan

Being organised is vital when it comes to managing health and safety risks effectively. To ensure that you have everything in order from the start of a project, use our straightforward checklist.

Different site, same setup

If you work in the same place, day in, day out, it’s fairly easy to be consistent in your approach to managing health and safety risks. However, if you’re constantly moving from one site to the next, it’s not quite as straightforward. So to help you each time you start on a new site, we have produced a new Project H&S Management Plan.

The aim

When setting up a job it’s easy to overlook the most important details. For example, formalising the safe systems of work to be followed. It’s also easy to get the paperwork in place in the office but to fail to deliver it to those who will actually need to follow it.

Follow the plan

To help you to take all the steps in the right order we suggest that you follow our plan. Firstly, it asks you to provide brief details of the job. This includes the: (1) “Address”; (2) plus names of the “project manager”; (3) “site supervisor”; and (4) “H&S advisor”. Next it asks you to state the start and finish dates of the job. This information may seem obvious but forcing you to write down the names, address, etc. will prevent you from overlooking such basic details.

Get the paperwork in place

The next section guides you through the process of preparing the safe system of work documentation for the job. It starts by asking you whether the “client specification and scope of works have been reviewed?”

It does this to prevent you from deciding how to do the job without all the facts to hand. For example, are there any site-specific risks that you need to consider, or rules that must be followed?

Warning. If you’re working for a large client, they are almost certain to have specific rules etc. that you will need to follow. They’re unlikely to overlook these.

Get it approved

The document then suggests that you submit your documentation to your H&S advisor and the client.

If this is done in advance of starting work, it should prevent any on-site delays, i.e. being stopped because they didn’t know how you were planning to work.

Project documents

The next part is a list of documents that you may want to send to the site for your staff to complete. For example, health and safety induction forms, training records, permit to work forms, etc.

Note. We have included a sample list on our document. Amend this to reflect the forms that your staff will need.