Health, Safety & Well-Being

Our Ambition

Our approach to health, safety and wellbeing supports our ambition to be an outstanding fire and rescue service in the following ways:

• By prioritising the wellbeing of our workforce by providing support and resources to maintain their health
• Safe place to work for all employees
• Minimising risk travelling to incidents and on the incident ground by providing a working environment in which contamination is carefully managed supported by safe systems of work

We aim to:

• Co-ordinate activities to reduce the level of sickness absence experienced by our workforce
• Seek to reduce injury and ill health levels within the workforce through a range of proactive and reactive measures to avoid ill health or injury or to facilitate a more rapid return to work
• Mitigate risks from contaminants for operational colleagues. Research in the area of contaminant management is continually evolving. We are committed to reducing the health risks caused by firefighting contaminants through a range of physical, behavioural and educational control measures
• Increase skills, knowledge and capability for those undertaking risk assessment and investigation activity
• Improve the effectiveness of process and practices within the Health and Safety Management framework
• Ensure the Occupational Health and Fitness provision, including welfare support for staff is effective and meeting the needs of staff. We have a number of established providers for staff wellbeing, mental and physical health support. It is timely to review this provision in conjunction with the workforce to determine how this provision needs to evolve in the future. This work is supported through better use of systems and outcome data for those accessing services.