16 May 2013

Health & Safety

There are several different points here.

First, correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I understand Health & Safety, I cannot facilitate someone else in taking an identified risk for which they have not been assessed as competent to manage, and therefore if I assess a situation between a person and a risk as non-compliant then either the person must be prevented from taking the risk, or the risk itself has to be reduced to bring the situation into compliance, otherwise I am responsible if an incident occurs.

Second, like everyone I hear mocking reports on the radio news about this or that "not being permitted for reasons of Health & Safety", when there is probably much more behind the issue than journalists are willing to report or even discover. However, it does sometimes feel like if electricity had been discovered / invented last week, Health & Safety concerns would ensure that it never reached consumers. I have been able, safely, to change a fuse in an electrical plug for the best part of fifty years, yet I am not permitted to do so at the University. Instead, I am required to post online a request for a University electrician to come and replace the fuse, and then wait for a week until the overworked electrician arrives, only to find that I am counselling and cannot be disturbed so they go away again.

Although it is not a Health & Safety issue, a similar attitude prevails over the use of IT equipment. I have been using computers on a daily basis since 1976, long before many of the IT departmental staff were born. Unsurprisingly, therefore, I became increasingly frustrated with the extreme level of control that the IT department maintained over the desktop computer that I used at work. The irony is that I was also required to keep a major piece of legacy software, essential to the operation of the counselling service, running for eight years with no support whatsoever from IT department.

It is as though a change has taken place, and we are now all considered to be idiots unless we have umpteen certificates that purport to prove otherwise. In reality, I suppose, as frustrating as the issue is to me, it is not about me: it is about the institution protecting itself, mostly for legal reasons, but also from people who are not competent and might pose a danger to others. Were I permitted to change a fuse, then every Abbott & Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and Marx Brother would want to be permitted to change their fuses, too ... and a fine mess that would cause. Were I permitted to perform disk housekeeping on my office computer, then every Mr Bean, Norman Wisdom and Frank Spencer would be on the telephone to the IT department asking for their hard drive to be restored, having accidentally wiped the drive as clean as a whistle.