EURO-DIESEL® – Breeding a Health and Safety Culture (The Following is a Promoted Article) Health and safety remains a great challenge for those in the power protection, conditioning and generation sectors, particularly in light of recent pressure on responsible practice stemming both from worldwide central governments and clients. Recognising contemporary market conditions and, furthermore, taking responsibility for the well-being of its customers, staff and the local environment, EURO-DIESEL® continues to justify just why it’s such a key player in today’s critical power industry. Established in 1989 in Belgium, EURO-DIESEL® has since developed an end-to-end service in design, manufacture, installation, commissioning and ongoing maintenance and long term support of bespoke critical power solutions. Having brought forth a new era of reliable continuous critical power supply, the company’s critical power systems have been employed across all manner of sectors, in countries around the world, totalling more than 1GWe of installed power capacity. Since attaining ISO 9001 certification in 2008, the EURO-DIESEL® UK subsidiary has undergone radical transformation. Not simply working in line with the requirements of certification, but going above and beyond that which is expected – either by the industry or clients themselves – EURO-DIESEL® has developed highly effective, integrated management systems across all strands of the business, encompassing health and safety, quality, and the environment. Whilst that’s inevitably seen the firm employ a number of new training programmes for use by directly-employed operatives and subcontractors, too, Rob Pitt, Managing Director of the UK subsidiary of EURO-DIESEL® is keen to stress that achieving excellent health and safety performance, in particular, is not about training alone. “Fundamentally, it’s a health and safety culture that forms the basis of the firms DNA,” Rob attests. “There’s a risk of viewing ISO certification as a box-ticking exercise and, similarly, that training is the ultimate solution. Treating it in that way, you’re unlikely to get the buy-in of customers and employees and so we’ve worked hard to educate all on the value and importance of health and safety along with the benefits of actioning what’s learned during training.” CHAS accreditation has, in many respects, been an important piece of the jigsaw in terms of cementing the firm’s strong stance on health and safety. According to Terry Wearn, QHSE Manager at the UK subsidiary of EURO-DIESEL® , association membership was pivotal during qualification and subsequent contract awards for the Greater Manchester Police. Rob adds, “CHAS has become much of a necessity during tendering and many organisations now have it as a pre-requisite. It also speeds up the process of re-accreditation with bodies like Safe Contractor, saving us lots of time and energy.” Having effectively situated health and safety at the core of the business, the UK subsidiary of EURO-DIESEL® holds regular health and safety training days for staff and their supply chain, publishes a monthly health and safety e-newsletter and organises toolbox talks. With such robust mechanisms in place, the company has held an exemplary health and safety record for a number of years now; achieving no Lost Time Incidents (LTI’s) in over 15 years. A key part of the company’s success rate in respect of health and safety lies in its attitude toward to accident reporting; the firm actively encourages operatives to report near misses and any other issues. Concentrating on near misses reduces the risks of more serious incidents occurring in the future. Rob provides further detail: “We don’t want to prevent engineers from reporting incidents for fear of reprimand. Whilst we take negligence incredibly seriously, staff should never be penalised for carrying out proper reporting procedure. We’ve successfully introduced an open communication forum wherein operatives can approach management, detail issues and, as a result, we can adapt our procedures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” EURO-DIESEL® is committed to sustainable development and protecting the environment with environmental management forming a key aspect of the Integrated Management System. In 2014, the UK subsidiary of EURO-DIESEL® further improved achieving certification to the ISO 14001 Environmental Management Standard and BS OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health & Safety Management Standard. In summary it is the mission of the UK subsidiary of EURO-DIESEL® to provide innovative critical power solutions that exceed customer expectations whilst ensuring the Health and Safety of all persons affected by their business activities whilst minimising their effect upon the environment.