Day 127 - 23 May 95 - Page 16
1 A. We have a restaurant safety audit that includes Area
2 Supervisors, Restaurant Managers and people working for me,
3 just following up on inspections, people's behaviour and
4 the management systems in the stores.
5
6 Q. So if they go into a store on an audit, the first question,
7 do they go in announced or unannounced?
8 A. My people do them unannounced.
9
10 Q. When they go there do they interview people?
11 A. They would do as part of the middle section, the
12 section looking at following procedures, yes.
13
14 Q. Do they look at the accident book?
15 A. Yes, they do, yes, to see that it is being properly
16 used and they would ask the management if they are looking
17 at the trends and discussing them.
18
19 Q. Do they look at any incident report form carbons which may
20 be in the restaurant?
21 A. They would look to see they were being filled in, yes.
22
23 Q. When you were appointed what were you given to understand
24 were the reasons for creating this new post?
25 A. Just before I was appointed, some new regulations come
26 out driven by the EEC, and it really was a bit of a change,
27 really, in the way that we managed safety here in the UK
28 from a legal stand point, in that these new regulations had
29 risk assessment as their basis which really had not come
30 into the way that people managed safety before.
31
32 Q. Right. Can you pause there, please, because this may be
33 important. Explain to us (in case we do not understand it)
34 what is meant by "risk assessment" and how it was, as you
35 put it, a new approach?
36 A. I suppose in the past the way that safety was monitored
37 in all organisations was to look at accident statistics.
38 The problem with those is that accidents, as many of us
39 know through experience, the outcome of a accident is often
40 down to luck and, therefore, they might not give you a true
41 reflection of what are the real dangers in any business.
42
43 Also, your accident statistics depend on how well your
44 recording and reporting procedures are. We are all human
45 and I am afraid, even in the best organisations, I am sure
46 that the recording is not 100 per cent, but the beauty of
47 risk assessment is that you look to see what could happen.
48 So you will look out for dangers in the restaurant. You
49 will look out for hazards; for example, chemicals that are
50 being used or the use of ladders.
51
52 You will then look at who is exposed to that hazard, who is
53 involved; is it employees? Is it the same employee, is it
54 all over? You also look at how frequently they come across
55 that hazard. Those three together will give you some idea
56 of what the risk is. For example, if you have a bottle of
57 bleach and it sits on a shelf with top on, there might an
58 inherent hazard there, but the risk is negligible because
59 nobody is ever exposed to it; whereas if you have got
60 something that is happening every day, obviously the risk
