Swimming centres should be a safe and healthy place for everyone. This includes clients who participate in swimming lessons, patrons who attend for public swims and staff that work in the pool everyday. Therefore, all swim centres should commit to ensure their workplace meets the health and safety standards for staff and others. In addition, you should eliminate or minimise the risk of injury to people and the risk of damage to plant and equipment.
Swim centres should achieve this by following relevant legislation and adopting a strategy of:
- Identifying hazards in the workplace
- Assessing risks to workers and others
- Deciding on control measures
- Implementing those controls
- Monitoring that the controls are effective
Does your centre provide:
- A safe work environment
- A safe systems of work for our workers
- Suitable and safe equipment
- Information, instruction, training & supervision to ensure staff are safe
Does your centre ensure that:
- It provides equipment maintenance
- Chemicals use is safe
- Managers and supervisors take reasonable precautions and exercise proper diligence to comply with safety obligations
Owners, managers and staff should work together to minimise risks and danger in the workplace. Then, it will only be on very rare occasions that an incident should occur. Therefore, health and safety and risk management should be an every day priority. This is because it ensures safety of everyone at the centre.
If an incident should occur it is important that the people involved fill out an appropriate form (please see below links). You should record and file all incidents so as to access any information at a later date for review, insurance or investigative purposes. Remember to fill out forms legibly and with as much detail as possible to make it easy to understand for anyone who will be reading the form in the future.
Laurie Lawrence