Health & Safety
The BTC Health and Safety Group is a small group of representatives that meet specifically to understand Health, Safety and Environmental issues within the industry. Meetings are held on an annual basis.
Image Source: Credit to HORIBA MIRA
The Group operates with an open forum within which, all and any, Health and Safety issues, can be, and are, discussed with total confidentiality. The group often shares individual company processes in order to find common solutions to problems that individual member companies may be facing. Recent group activity has involved discussing and evaluating many varied Industry wide issues ranging from Test Cell Entry through to Company vehicle use and business driving, Lone working situations, working at heights and Permit to Work schemes.
The Group collects and collates industry wide statistics in order to better understand issues faced by all the members, individual member companies can then assess their own Health and Safety positioning against others within the same industry. This data once collected is reviewed by the group in order to better understand Cause and Effect from Near Miss incidents and accidents analysis along with evaluation of the reasons for incidents or accidents, loss time events and potential injuries that could possibly be avoided.
The group can also be used to provide guidance to new members and also to assess any new issues faced by the industry and then to share common practices, and guidelines, where applicable. Recent projects undertaken by the group include providing safety and handling guidelines on the use and storage of Ethanol based fuel and evaluation and comparisons of individual company Risk Assessment processes to ensure that member companies have sufficient knowledge available to meet any legal requirements, EV Propulsion Systems Testing is a relatively new area that would also benefit from shared industry practices.
Sharing of data and statistics, whilst talking openly about individual company experiences within the group, has meant that individual member companies have been able to better understand, and where needed, re-evaluate their own company approach to Health and Safety, to ensure that everybody working within the industry is being kept safe at all times.