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Health and Safety
The Service understands that the health, safety and wellbeing of its staff are fundamental to its operations. Not only do we follow recognised best practices and sector-specific guidance to make sure we are compliant with legal requirements; we endeavour to go beyond this and seek opportunities to create a positive health and safety culture for all. This approach is intrinsically linked with our moral duty to protect all staff and anyone else affected by our activities. As part of the Service’s commitment to collaboration, we also provide a Health and Safety service for Humberside Police.
It is recognised that our staff often work in hazardous and rapidly changing environments. However, our positive health and safety culture makes sure that this is mitigated to the lowest practicable risk. This is directly reflected within our governance and reporting mechanisms, which demonstrates that injuries sustained at or while responding to emergency incidents are less common than those occurring during training or routine activities. All of which suggests that our safety measures and supervision at incident scenes are effective.
In support of this, the Service is committed to maximising all opportunities to learn and improve.
This means that every near miss or accident is thoroughly investigated to make sure that lessons are learned, contributing to a safer working environment for all. Find out more in our annual performance report.
Read our video transcript here
The health and safety team provides a safe working environment,
making sure that we conduct risk assessments
and have suitable policies in place to safeguard our teams.
So as a team, we provide expert advice,
competent support, and compliance in all of the areas across the sector.
The team also carry out all the incident investigations.
We provide risk assessments. We carry out audits too,
and that helps us establish where our risks are and what we can do for continual improvement.
Having robust policies in place, ensure that we are compliant with legislation,
as well as ensuring that we're supplying suitable control
measures to ensure we are able to safeguard our teams,
when undertaking training, as well as emergency response whilst out in the community.
We operate a no blame culture, which is really important with regards to health and safety.
It's important that we're informed of near misses
and accidents and incidents to ensure that suitable investigations can be
undertaken to identify improvements that are required to ensure safety.
We do safety briefings. We also do incident debriefs,
so we can learn from everything that we do in every place that we go to to ensure that
we continually provide the best service that we can.
So our focus at the moment is definitely on training.
It's on our procedures to ensure that everybody is aware of their accountabilities
and responsibilities within the service that ensures that we've got a good safety culture.
We continually review and update our approach to health and safety.
It's really important that we recognise changes and legislation to ensure that we remain compliant.
A big part of what we do is working with each individual district,
with four districts that are all very different.
It's important that we understand the context of the risks that align with each of those.
So we ensure that our workforce are equipped with the correct policies,
the correct training, and the guidance documents that support that to
ensure that their work is to the best of their ability
and compliant at all times.
Environmental Sustainability Strategy
Building on the previous Environmental Sustainability Plan, Humberside Fire and Rescue Service have worked with sector specialists to create a new and updated Sustainability Strategy for 2025-2030. The strategy details an ambitious vision that aims to challenge our own organisation to be the best it can be, whilst also contributing to wider United Nations Sustainability Development goals (such as carbon neutrality).
Practically, this will be achieved by applying environmental, social and economic considerations in all of our decision-making processes, and the subsequent actions we take. By reviewing our plans and actions through these three lenses we can identify opportunities to make all our activity more sustainable.