I was recently reading an article in RIDE magazine (December 2010 edition), reminding me of the risk of permanent hearing loss in motorcyclists. Some people have an irrational hatred of motorcyclists and so may think they deserve it. Let’s call them misomotosyklétists (OK, I made that one up). We all know that some motorcyclists and scooterists do stupid things but so do car drivers and cyclists for that matter. Since I ride/drive all three (not at the same time) I assume that I’m hated at least some of the time.

Motorcycle engines are largely exposed and normally rev at least twice as fast as car engines, so they generate a fair bit of noise compared to cars, even with a legal exhaust (or ‘can’ as we call it – get with the jargon, don’t ask any questions and you’ll fit right in). But it’s not the engine noise or exhaust noise that is the problem. Rather it’s air turbulence around the rider’s helmet (especially around the neck region).

It’s tricky to measure noise levels inside a motorcycle helmet (or ‘lid’ – jargon again). Ok, you could create a helmet the size of a room, so that you could fit in your motorcyclist, the tester and all his kit, but that’s just a designer’s dream. Anyway, there’d be no room to carry that pizza box, which would be a real travesty. No, there is an official method (ISO 11904-1) involving positioning a probe microphone at the entrance to the ear canal itself (though it will fit into just about any orifice, which is a problem if the tester gets bored). This is outlined in the approved code of practice (L108) accompanying the Control of Noise at Work regulations 2005.

Noise levels are typically found to be around 90 – 107 dB(A), depending on speed. 107 dB(A) is like standing next to a chain saw or jackhammer. Screen and helmet design can limit the noise level. There are even aftermarket skirts (before you start, it fits around the base of the helmet) but, in my experience, they fall off within a mile or so. But a good deal of noise remains. This is not going to be too much of an issue for the occasional leisure rider but, if you use motorcycles or scooters for work (like couriers, pizza delivery, or police motorcyclists), and especially riding at high speeds for long periods, hearing loss is likely.

Ear plugs are the usual answer and, in the main are very effective. In my experience, the first time you wear ear plugs on a motorcycle, it’s both uncomfortable and disorientating. It’s like you’re disconnected, like a video game with muted sound effects; it doesn’t quite seem real. But persevere and you get used to it. This is exactly like my life.

I recently bought an Amazon Kindle. I’d been thinking about it for a while, but finally dived in. There’s lots about how it works on Amazon’s website but this is my experience; my review if you like. I was especially interested to see how handy it was for mobile learning.

The Kindle is about the size of a novel, but much thinner. Mine came 3G and wireless enabled which means it can nearly always connect to the net (via 3G phone signal technology) but will take advantage of wireless internet hotspots (and your own wireless network at home) for faster download speeds.

It’s designed mainly for reading books in its own Kindle format (and eBook/ePub variant standard). Indeed, it can even read it to you, as it’s loaded with a text-to-speech (TTS) engine. There’s lots of free classics for download if you like Alice in Wonderland or Aristotle, otherwise you have to pay – it downloads books very quickly.

The experimental functions it’s loaded with are what interests me here. It comes with a native pdf reader, so I could easily transfer my pdf course notes to it and read them. Yes, it’s black and white and shades of grey, but has excellent resolution and the ability to re-orientate the page and change the font size.

Pictures, diagrams and all that were perfectly displayed. Amazon run a free conversion service too – changing pdfs (and other documents) to Kindle format. This allows you to take advantage of the extra functions too, like TTS.

As well as being able to play audio books, it can play mp3 tracks. So, you can take podcasts and other audio learning media with you or even listen to it whilst reading. It has a 4GB flash memory, which is enough for 3,500 kindle books apparently but, if you’re adding pdfs and music, that doesn’t go all that far.

It comes with a basic web browser which is easy to use. I had no difficulty loading the RRC webpage and navigating around. It doesn’t play flash animations very well though.

So is it the future? I think it’s pretty good for the money. If you want mobile learning to replace everything else, I think you’ll be disappointed. If, instead, you see mobile learning as supplementing other means and fitting in with your lifestyle, then I think you’ll be pretty pleased. Get someone else to buy it for you and you’ll definietly be pleased.

In earlier blogs I looked at Lord Young’s report into the state of H&S in the UK. He mentioned the issue of competence. As it turns out, the Safety & Health Practitioner (that erudite journal of safety practitioners) also ran an article on competence (spooky, hey?).

The authors stated that probably the four main activities tackled in a safety practitioner’s job were risk assessment, training, accident investigation and auditing (of various forms). It was quite an interesting article and is worth a read – so that you know what you should be doing in between meals.

The authors noted that safety training was frequently poor – aimless, ill-defined, dull, presentation biased and lacking any real evaluation. They recognised that since many expect safety people to train as part of the job, there is an expectation that they already have that skill when, in practice, they don’t.

I think the problem in this type of training is 3-fold. (well, there’s a lot more, but let’s just stick to three things for now). Firstly, there is a popular view that “knowledge is stuff” and that the trainers job is somehow to transfer this to the audience, rather than to help them create their own understanding of it.

Secondly, related to the first point, people who do a bit of training on the side often come at it from a presentation skills perspective (usually one based almost exclusively on powerpoint). But that’s only one aspect of teaching/training. If you stick to that, you will be pretty one dimensional and what works for 20 minutes cannot be sustained for a morning or whole day’s training, without becoming dull.

Thirdly, poor trainers may actually believe that they’re good at it and so be reticent to expand their skill set because they don’t see the benefit. This may be arrogance or it may simply be that they haven’t recognised they aren’t good (or, more likely, no-one’s told them).

The truth is, training is a transferrable skill set that can be learned. OK, some desirable aspects, such as engaging personality, you bring with you, but much of the rest can be taught. With a little practice, imagination and risk-taking, a dull presentation can be turned around to a purposeful, engaging and even enjoyable experience for the ‘audience’. To achieve this, what people need is a basic, but systematic, introduction to what teaching/training involves and a little practice. What I’m talking about is the whole arena of deciding what training is needed, planning the course/session (learning outcomes, teaching approaches, resources, methods of assessing learning etc), delivering it, assessing what learning has taken place and evaluating the success of the course as a whole. This last step should enable you to identify room for improvement. Obviously this all has to be proportionate – so there should eb lots of flexibility built in.

There are many ‘train the trainer’ courses out there, with some better than others. Some fixed on a specific specialism (like manual handling) whereas others teach you the core skills that you can adapt for every situation. Things like the CIEH Training Skills and Practice fall into the latter category.

If all you do is short presentations to the board or board-people then training skills is unlikely to be needed (people can resist most forms of torture for short periods). But if you do more than that, do your trainees a favour and expand your skill set. Look on it as a CPD thing. You never know, you might actually find it quite liberating not to be shackled to powerpoint and back in control of your training. Then again, if shackles are your thing….

I was looking forward to this. Mug of tea in one hand, stripped to the waist (well, no, perhaps not). I thought I’d try out HSE’s online risk assessment tool for offices (more tools to follow later). This was one of the recommendations of Lord Young’s review (see last three blogs). I decided to go for the ‘Ello ‘Ello option (er, you know “I will say this only once”). Well, with the cuts and everything, you can’t be sure it’ll be there if you return tomorrow.

You can find all of this quite easily on the HSE website.

From my perspective, the approach looks a little like a combination of HSE’s well respected “5 steps to risk assessment” guidance, coupled with output from some of their separately issued example risk assessments. The benefit of doing it this way is that it pushes you through it in a consolidated fashion, with the examples readily to hand to help you complete it and some of the common answers already as a check box for inclusion.

The introduction is friendly, reminding you risk assessment isn’t difficult. You just need to know what to look for and here’s a checklist to help. It’s worth saying that you need to be familiar with the area in which you work (pretty obviously) and maybe ask around if you’re unsure if those hazards exist in your workplace (for my train spotter readers, I’d like to point out that this means actually talking to people). We then proceed in a kind of topic-based expert system approach – asking questions and ticking boxes on topics of slips/trips/falls, manual handling, fire etc. It establishes what you’re already doing first. If you check “more action needed” (well, it does give you quite a few hints) it opens up a box so you can record those. This includes rudimentary action tracking too (assigning actions to individuals, due dates and whether complete).

Some things are obviously more involved. For example, the section on computers refers to separate workstation assessments (in the ‘what you are already doing’ bit) – so there’s more work than first appears. The same is true of fire too. But, if you weren’t reading carefully, you might miss that.

There’s clunkiness here and there as you might expect (and forgive) because it’s new. It’s lacking a “back” button to go back if you had forgotten something in a section – you could use the web browser’s own back button as a work round (though there is the opportunity to review the whole thing right at the end). When you get to the end and press the finish button you get a neat pdf output, formatted in the tabular style of the familiar “5-steps” guidance. The best bit is that it’s highly summarised (2 -3 pages or so).

It’s worth saying, that if you don’t check any of the boxes or add anything for a specific topic, that topic will not appear on the final risk assessment. This means it only records significant findings – but if you forget to check a box by accident, it won’t appear on the risk assessment record to remind you. If I were new to this, I think I might have wanted a simple line in the risk assessment to say I’d at least considered and discounted it as insignificant at that time in case of changes in the future. Kind of a reassurance thing.

So, in summary, a good effort that pushes you smoothly through the basics but has its foibles. What I like actually is the fact that it doesn’t let you get away with “generic”. You still have to know your workplace and think it through. But, it does give you a good deal of help to get your house in order.

So how was it for you? Where did I put my cigarette…

In this final part of the review, I’ll take in standards and the services before bashing the EU yet again (but they deserve it). I’ll ignore likely changes to RIDDOR as that, quite frankly, is pretty dull.

Now, in my earlier blogs, I’ve touched on the issue of H&S consultants and the disproportionate approach for small, low risk businesses. Dave is pretty unimpressed by the lack of barriers to entry to the profession of safety consultant. He wants to beef it all up by insisting that they have minimum qualifications and experience and appear on a register. In practice this means if you’re CMIOSH, you should get automatic entry (lower standards are suggested for internal H&S officers).

Some specialist areas of H&S have been regulated for many years. For example, Dangerous Goods Safety Advisers have had to be vocationally licensed for around the last 10 years. CMIOSH though is quite different and I’m not sure that it will really tackle the issue. Yes, he’s also suggesting that there are tough disciplinary measures and policing by Trading Standards, but those sorts of things only get actioned when things go badly wrong. I’m not convinced it’ll tackle the “gold-plating”, especially if you don’t know you’ve been “gold-plated” and are doing more than you should have to.

It appears that part of the problem has been that some insurers have insisted that even small businesses employ the services of a H&S consultant to get their risk assessments done. I’m not sure how widespread this practice is, but it could easily be used to get out of paying out a claim, I suspect. So, Dave has it in for them. In fact, he’s written a letter to the insurers – good luck with that.

Dave has also noticed that HSE and LA enforcement is sometimes inconsistent and inefficient. As well as leveraging HSE’s expertise more for small businesses, he’s also suggested joint food safety and H&S inspections (seems sensible, just like combining E, H&S – the logical next step with EA and SEPA?). I think in most cases, it could just mean getting the right check list.

A stroke of genius is actually delegating at least some of these inspections (I think mainly food hygiene) to accredited organisations. I guess this would work a little like ISO 9001 external auditing. Provided it’s robust, reasonably priced and respectable, why not? I guess there’s only the slight issue of enforcement (where immediate closure of an establishment might be needed) – but if HSE/LA retain the higher risk areas, then that should remain a hypothetical.

Dave is also rather fed up with the possibility of members of the emergency services (Police/Fire) doing something exceptional (heroic, even) facing investigation and prosecution because they put themselves at risk. This is a perversion of morality and needs to be stamped out. OK we don’t want a “Gung Ho” attitude but heroism is to be commended.

Education get’s some attention. We’ve already looked at some aspects of this – classroom risk assessments. But, as every parent knows, school also involves a number of educational trips, including those to adventure sports centres. Lord Young is intending to remove the grotesque amount of bureaucracy surrounding these, that adds little value and dissuades people from even bothering. The Educational value of these activities is so great that something must be done. So, it’ll be simplified and a proportionate approach adopted (where the educational benefit is weighed against the risk). In reality, this is just getting back to the roots of “so far as reasonably practicable” which has been slowly modified into “just don’t even think about it; I have a lawyer waiting in the other room”.

Finally, Dave gets to grips with the law. It’s too diffused, complicated and increasingly compliance-based. The original 1974 Act (HSWA) gets a thumbs up but the EU share the blame for degrading its power. But it’s also the problems in how it’s interpreted and implemented. Dave suggests that they all get brought back into a single set of regulations again. This two-dimensional filing system (like my bedroom when I was a teenager) is unhelpful. Yes, the experts and free masons know where everything is (in a filing cabinet in their lodge basement) but what about the rest of us?

Lord Young wants to pare the EU legislation back too – that proportionate approach again, especially to eradicate this “eliminate all risk however trivial and whatever the cost” thinking that seems to have been applied to inherently low risk businesses. This may need an invasion force into the heart of Europe to bang a few heads together. This may therefore not be achieved in our lunchtime, so must be tackled in between courses.

So, in summary, Dave has come up with pretty sensible recommendations. Most address frustrations that we have probably all encountered and felt powerless to tackle. The solutions are not terribly surprising. Some are easy to implement and others will never happen. Either way, it had to be said.