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Webinar – 5 Steps to Achieving COSHH Compliance

How many steps are there to COSHH compliance? Ensuring your employees are safe while working with hazardous substances is extremely important but it can also be demanding trying to manage all the paperwork.

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July 1, 2021

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Ensuring your employees are safe while working with hazardous substances is extremely important but it can also be demanding trying to manage all the paperwork.

How many steps are there to COSHH compliance? How can health and safety professionals easily prove COSHH compliance and – most importantly – protect their staff?

These were the questions we aimed to answer with our most recent webinar: ‘5 Steps to Achieving COSHH Compliance’. Read on for the webinar recording and our breakdown of the 5 key take aways from the session.

Build your Chemical Inventory

Document your structure – don’t assume you know where all your chemicals are. Ideally, assign an individual as champion to each node
Train the people who are collecting chemical information – make sure they know what constitutes a ‘chemical’ and what needs to be included
For large organizations, sort out chemicals by location and geography, not where you assume chemicals are (in a laboratory etc.)
Collect product information by department – its vital to design a consistent inventory template
Try not to make allowances for what chemicals you collect, put down your FULL list

Webinar Poll: When was the last time you updated your chemical inventory?

Source your safety data sheets

Best practice is to source your safety data sheets (SDS) centrally
Try to avoid duplication of products and (less obvious) duplication of manufacturers
Source the most recent safety data sheets directly from manufacturers
Be mindful of changes to legislation and regulations when it comes to updating your safety data sheets
Record basic information – revision dates and document source

Identify and summarise your hazards

Identify and record hazards from section 2 of your safety data sheets
Summarize your hazards by department/ area
Fix the big problems first: – Substitute or eliminate you major hazards – Carcinogenic Mutagenic Reprotoxic (CMR) – Are your main controls sufficient by department, storage, labelling, PPE etc.
The COSHH assessment remains the primary source of information, where you’re staff go to understand how to use the chemical
Using a system like chemical manager can simplify the laborious task of sourcing your SDS and compiling hazard information

Complete your COSHH Assessments

Create simple, efficient and relevant COSHH Risk Assessment templates – overly complex templates will fail
Best practice is to use as much multiple choice option as possible
Avoid using ‘free text’ options – they are slow and can encourage copying and pasting from SDS
Be mindful of other regulations apart from COSHH (DSEAR, Environmental etc.)
Completing an assessment should be seen as a collaboration between the health and safety team and the chemical users
COSHH Assessments should be completed in the environment where the chemical is in use, if possible

Distribution of documentation

Make Safety Data Sheets and COSHH assessments available to staff for all the chemicals that they use
Ideally, use soft copies – a document management system can allow for searching and revision control
Hard copies may be needed in areas that do not have access to a system, but procedures must be in place to keep them in line with digital versions
Your staff need to be trained to ensure they understand how to use COSHH assessments and SDS

Conclusion

Chemical management software can streamline your processes, help you to prove compliance and make your workplace safer. If you want to read more about how chemical safety software can change your chemical management system, visit EcoOnline today.