Health and safety management
Health and safety management is the IGC domain that tests how an organisation plans, organises, monitors and reviews its arrangements, not merely whether individual hazards are controlled. Questions use a management-system model - usually Plan–Do–Check–Act, also examined as POPMAR (Policy, Organising, Planning and implementing, Measuring performance, Audit and review) - and expect actions to be placed in the correct stage.
Core rules
- A written policy is required where five or more employees work; it needs a signed statement of intent, defined organisation roles and arrangements (procedures).
- "Reasonably practicable" balances risk against the cost, time and trouble of control; cost must be grossly disproportionate before a control is rejected.
- Risk assessment follows five steps: identify hazards; decide who may be harmed and how; evaluate risk and decide controls; record significant findings; review and update.
- Apply the hierarchy of control: eliminate, substitute, engineering controls, administrative controls (safe systems of work, permits to work), then PPE last.
- Competence combines knowledge, training, experience and skill; consulting workers is a legal duty and improves risk decisions.
- Active monitoring (inspections, sampling, audits) finds problems before harm; reactive monitoring (accidents, near misses, RIDDOR data) finds them after.
Worked example
A warehouse records three manual-handling injuries in a year. One answer says "retrain staff". A stronger answer traces the system: the policy arrangements lack a manual-handling procedure; the risk assessment missed repetitive lifting onto a mezzanine; the hierarchy points first to a conveyor (engineering) rather than team lifting or training; active monitoring missed the near-miss pattern; review tests whether the conveyor reduced incidents. The stronger answer links each action to planning, control, monitoring and review, which is where the marks sit.
Traps
- Listing controls without linking them to a management-system stage.
- Treating PPE or training as first-line controls.
- Confusing audit (checks the system) with inspection (checks conditions).
- Writing "reasonably practical" instead of "reasonably practicable" - a defined legal test.
- Quoting accident ratios as exact laws rather than indicators.