DALKIA RAISES HEALTH AND SAFETY AWARENESS

23 March 2009

Dalkia has recently held an international Health and Safety Awareness week across every element of its business, in every country in which it operates. Dedicating time and resource to such an integrated initiative demonstrates Dalkia’s belief that Health, Safety, Quality and Environmental management are of paramount importance in achieving its business objectives and helping its customers achieve theirs.

Dalkia’s aim is to proactively raise awareness and reduce the risk of accidents and those that happen to 20% below last year’s figures. Dalkia’s Health and Safety Awareness week saw Dalkia communicating primarily with its own staff, as well as its customers, to reinforce attitudes towards health and safety. Health and safety awareness affects everyone regardless of their workplace, whether in an office or high-risk industrial environment. Dalkia’s constant aim is to help remove risk to avoid accidents from occurring in the first place.

The Health and Safety Awareness week required careful coordination, with Dalkia communicating across a number of countries to all its staff. This was implemented through Dalkia’s own internal communications programme with newsletters, posters and videos while staff were encouraged to feedback their thoughts on best practice procedures with a dedicated phone line for Dalkia’s staff. This enabled them to share their own health and safety processes and ideas for improvement. The communications programme was supported by senior management visits to customer sites, demonstrating the seriousness with which Dalkia takes its Health and Safety responsibilities.

To ensure staff operate safely in all environments with full understanding of the risks and how to minimise them, Dalkia took the Health and Safety Awareness week as an opportunity to simulate emergency situations, specific to various customer sites. These ranged from potential chemical spillages to fire outbreaks. In each situation the assistance and advice of emergency services, such as local fire brigades, was integrated with the procedures for a fully joined up approach to the initiative.

Colin Goodwin, Technical Services Director for Dalkia said, “By taking this strongly proactive approach Dalkia is able to lower risks and prevent accidents by ensuring all staff and customers have a full understanding and complete awareness of the high risk environments in which they operate. To this end Health and Safety plays a key part in Dalkia’s core values and this is further evidenced by the triple certification bundle across its UK businesses to: OHSAS 18001 Health & Safety, ISO 14001 Environmental and ISO 9001 quality standards.”

For more information about Dalkia visit www.dalkia.co.uk