Health and Safety at work; why are we involved?

In a word it's risk. Risk for employees, risk for self-employed and risk for businesses.

For many of our retail or domestic clients this only has a bearing with us if the are injured at work and have to progress a claim with an insurer and/or ACC.

For employees

There are a couple of points we discuss with employee clients on the way through, these are:

- Their rights under the Health And Safety at Work Act (HSWA as it's known), which include the company they work for needing to have a H&S Policy, and where there is more than 20 employees, they need to have a staff H&S representative, or they can ask for one below 20 employees, if they feel they need one.
- The other and more serious one, if they are responsible for H&S at work they have personal exposure if there is a H&S issue and they are taken to task over this. Meaning their house, and other assets, could be at risk. Which is where we talk good estate planning.

For a self-employed and businesses this impacts in a few ways.

For businesses and self-employed the discussion has much wider ramifications. This is in the area of both ACC and insurance. Which is why we get involved, we co-ordinate and ensure things fit into place nicely.

• The H&S policy will dovetail into contractor induction training and management as well as staff training too. This can have impact on the risk premium the business pays for its general liability insurance.
• The positive focus on H&S can result in a more positive outcome for product safety too. Once procedures with the business flow through the organisation and there's more focus on safety, this naturally translates to product safety too. Resulting in better terms and premiums for product liability coverage too.
• The positive focus on H&S for the organisation can improve process safety, less damaged equipment, uncontrolled fires and injury, which can also have a positive impact on the underwriting of the general liability covers.

On the human side

With less accidents and injuries, the more favourable the ACC situation for a business is.

We do a lot of work with businesses to better manage their ACC situations. This has resulted in substantial improvements to both the businesses attitude towards ACC and the levies that are charged to the business.

When there's better understanding of H&S, our experience has been a better business evolves from it.

We have some clients in the H&S area that we have seen substantial improvements not only in their safety, but how they run and present their business. Resulting in more work for them.

Interestingly enough the help from the renewed focus on H&S directly drives capacity improvements for the businesses concerned, which meant they have better utilisation with better profits when this extra work came in.

What about the rest?

Around all of this, we wrap our other services, life, income and medical insurance planning. Because accidental disabilities only account for 1/3 of all disabilities*, having cover and support for the other 2/3's of disabilities from medical causes is important.

We are finding that both medical insurance and income protection reduce the amount of time a person is out of the business.

For small businesses this can be critical as they often can't hold a position open for any great length of time.

Making it really important for both the business and employee to get them back to work quickly. With the right medical and financial support to do this in a sustainable way.

What's worse than an absent employee, an underperforming one.

If the under performance is due to a medical condition that has not been treated well or had sufficient time to recover, this can be an enormous drain on the business. We are finding this particularly with medical conditions rather than accident injuries.

With an accident, ACC does a decent job of both fixing you and getting back to work with some rehab support.

With a medical condition and only the public system for treatment, while the treatment may be ok, the ongoing support needed for rehab back to work is often not provided. And there's certainly no co-ordinated rehab program either.

Where you get this sorted is with income protection. Medical insurance will get you your treatment quicker, but it's no better at rehab than the public system. Your rehab support comes from your income protection.

Call us

If you want a comprehensive review of your risk; including H&S, ACC and insurance, we're the only ones we know of able to do this for you in a comprehensive and cost effective way.

Get in touch or message us and we can have a chat about what's needed and get something started.

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*GenRe Claim Stats