Health And Safety Document Management

Businesses in the UK must comply with the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and any records created as a result of Health and Safety must be kept, and safely stored, not only for legislative reasons but also as evidence in legal cases, demonstrating the correct safety procedures and processes within the organisation and to also identify staff training needs.

But how long do you keep Health and Safety Records for and how long is it before they reach the end of their administrative life?  Whilst it is paramount to retain documents for a certain period, it is also essential that they are disposed of formally and in line with legislation.

In many organisations, health and safety records are not always kept in one place and whilst this leads to communication problems,  it also challenging trying to locate documents for audit, inspection, review, evidence or planning.

Failure to hold or provide accurate health and safety records may lead to penalties of prosecution, prohibition notices, improvement notices or heavy compensation payments.

With so many vital documents to keep, and over such a long length of time, storage and security is evidently a dilemma for many companies.

Health and Safety Document Management – Records may include:

• Accidents and Incidents
• Purchasing of Plant and Equipment
• Maintenance of Plant and Machinery
• Maintenance and Security Records
• Health and Safety Training and Development
• Dangerous Substances under COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health)
• Reporting of injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences
• Fire Safety Checks
• Procedural Records
• Health and Safety Manuals
• Employment Records – including medical records
• Waste Disposal
• Asbestos at Work
• Noise Damage
• Manual Handling
• Risk Assessments

Whilst it is unnecessary to keep records forever, you do need to keep information for a certain amount of time and there are a number of documents that employers have a statutory requirement to keep for a specified period e.g.

• List of employees exposed to group 3 and 4 biological agents (10 years)
• Exposure to Hazardous Substances in the Workplace (up to 40 years depending on the record)
• Reportable Injuries, disease and dangerous occurrences (3 years)
• Accident book (3 years from last entry)
• Asbestos at Work – Health Surveillance (40 years from last incident)
• And many more!

How Can Cleardata Help?

At Cleardata UK, we work with companies throughout the UK providing secure document scanning, document storage and document management services.

Document Scanning

As one of the largest and securest scanning bureaus in the UK, we can scan documents of all sizes and every record is 200% quality checked using our own bespoke audit software and qualified checking staff.

Scanning your documents in a format to suit you, images can be saved to disk or uploaded to a secure ftp file for easy viewing.

Having invested in first class Kodak scanning technology, we scan millions of documents each month and every record is bar coded prior to scanning and only dealt with by our own authorised, disclosure checked employees.

Health and safety records can be scanned to BIP0008, providing legal admissibility for electronically stored documents in the event that they need to be used as evidence in the future.

Should you have documents that you prefer to be kept on site, we can even create a scanning bureau within your organisation.

Document Management

Cleardata offers a cost effective web enabled document management system allows you to access your health and safety records from any location.

Working for your business Cleardata’s DART system enables you to upload documents for viewing in their original format (Excel, Word, PowerPoint etc) and each record can be indexed with appropriate keywords to ensure FAST retrieval.

Allowing you see who else has dealt with or worked on records, DART offers a complete audit trail for a single document as well as the opportunity to add notes, messages and assign tasks to other people within your organisation.

Document Storage

Renowned throughout the UK for our secure document storage services, we have state of the art facilities to keep your Health and Safety records safe and secure on a short or long term basis.

Accredited to ISO27001 and ISO9001, our document storage facilities are fully protected to ensure the security of all items inside – safe guarding your documents against theft, fire and flood.

Storage features include: VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus), flood detection sensors, 24-hour remote CCTV, biometric fingerprint access and Redcare security.

All staff at Cleardata are CRB checked, disclosure checked and specially trained to handle confidential documents and you can rest assured that when you send items to us for storage, they will only ever be handled by authorised personnel.

Once your documents have arrived in our facility, they will be indexed and bar coded to ensure easy retrieval in the future.

Scan on Demand

Should you require an archived file for any purpose, we offer a complete scan on demand service.

Working in conjunction with our onsite scanning bureau, we can find your records, scan them and upload them to you in a requested format before returning them to our secure archive – all within two hours of your initial request.

Document Destruction Services

When it’s time for your documents to be destroyed, we provide a confidential shredding and disposal service and can dispose of large volumes of information using our industrial shredding equipment.

All documents will be shredded to level 4 security and a certificate of destruction will be issued for audit purposes.