Are you confident that if a health and safety auditor walked through the door to your catering business within the next few seconds that you would pass every point on their list without a single flaw?
- Do you have an effective food safety management system in place and do you use health and safety software to ensure that the rules are being followed, that purposeful action is taken when an issue reveals itself and that you have logged every matter that needs recording?
- If you are certain of your knowledge and ability, perhaps you have recently taken training, have you employed health and safety in catering measures throughout your business or have you let this slide away, time and other tasks preoccupying your days?
- Now look around your workforce. Has every member of your team from the cleaner to the trainee to the new starter and the long term supervisor taken training in health and safety in catering, improved their knowledgebase and eradicated any bad practices? Would you present them to an auditor as the model of compliance?
If you hesitated, even for a second, about the answer to any of these questions then please don’t take chances or ignore health and safety in catering responsibilities.
Your customers, staff, suppliers and business acquaintances expect you to work effectively and in line with legislation and to do otherwise is to escalate hygiene and accident risks.
Without actively seeking to comply with health and safety and food hygiene rules you could be leaving yourself, your team and your business open to prosecution, fines and legal action.
Training may take a few hours and cost a little money but the wealth of knowledge accrued from training with health and safety auditing experts like Food Alert in London will pay for the course time after time in practical use.
It only takes one incident to tarnish a reputation, one team member to accidentally poison a customer or one truly bad audit to close a business.
Health and safety training and using health and safety software can transform the business’ wellbeing and ensure survival.
Think of training as insurance, if every person knows their obligations and is managed via a health and safety software package then peace of mind should ensue.
Health and safety auditing shouldn’t send you in to a blind panic, prepare well and it won’t be harrowing because you will have well founded confidence which is far better than the “cross your fingers” method.
An excellent example of health and safety software is FACT from Food Alert.
Training is delivered by their Head of IT who is fully conversant with the FACT software and how it positively impacts on areas including compliance, accident management and logging, EHO actions, food hygiene and personalised risk assessments.
It negates the need for paperwork and the health and safety software works on smart phones, tablet and PC’s for maximum convenience.
Train, gain qualifications and manage health and safety in catering with professional resources.
