PUWER Regulations

PUWER regulations – Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations – is an important part of HSE Health and Safety Executive legislation to enforce good health and safety practices in the work place.

Many employers do not know that PUWER exists because of previously weak enforcement. Below are some examples of dangerous work equipment:

• Badly designed hand tools such as screwdrivers, handsaws, drills and knives which strain wrists and cause carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.
• Air powered machine tools that do not have fail-safe cut outs.
• Unguarded power tools or machine tools.
• Items used to jury-rig a job.
• Badly organised workstations.
• Assembly lines running at speeds they were not designed for.
• Photocopiers that are not regularly maintained and emit ozone.
• Sewing machines with elbow operated speed controls that cause RSI.
• Printing machines causing unnecessary bending of the wrists to load the card/paper feed-hoppers.

Our Risk Master health and safety management software system backed up by our health and safety consultancy can provide you with a comprehensive management system for managing your PUWER assessments, COSHH assessments and all aspects of your health and safety procedures and management.

Built into the core of the Risk Master health and safety management software are the following:

• Accident and near miss reporting and investigation
• First aid management
• Complete suite of risk assessment tools
• System for tracking remedial and outstanding actions complete with control measures
• A comprehensive system for measuring each site and its departments against key performance indicators
• General risk assessment tool
• COSHH
• Noise assessment
• Manual handling
• Display screen equipment
• Lifting of loads
• Provision and use of work equipment regulations risk assessment - PUWER

Providing advice on PUWER is based around the need to ensure that equipment and machinery is set up and used in a manner that will not cause risk or injury to the person using or working around it.

Advice can be general or specifically based around risk assessments on the use of certain equipment and machinery. Risk assessment is a very important step in the management and control of your health and safety responsibilities and forms a key part of what the HSE Health and Safety Executive require of your management and directors.

Carrying out a risk assessment without properly understanding its purpose or having a framework to use it in can lead from it being a complete waste of time to being a danger to your employees and management. While a risk assessment is a cornerstone of good health and safety management, without having a framework and process to move the risk assessment on to the next stage where management of the associated risks and providing solutions to the problems, you can easily suffer from a false sense of security.

At Risk Master, through our health and safety consultancy and the Risk Master health and safety management software system, we have help you with PUWER advice and to set up and manage your risk assessments. In this way, we will work with you to ensure that they are fully effective and provide you with the tools, framework and confidence to carry them out along with the surrounding analysis and risk management that surrounds this process.

Through our Risk Master health and safety management system, you will be able to carry out a risk assessment within a framework that will then help you with the follow through steps that you need to take and diarise to ensure that they are put in place.

Risk Master has a weighting tool that helps you gauge how effective your management of a risk assessment is. This tool along with many other features and benefits of Risk Master will help you and your organisation provide a fully effective health and safety management system.

Call us today on 01326 375422 to discuss your clients requirements in confidence or click here to order a demonstration of our Risk Master health and safety management software.