UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

School of Engineering

SAFETY PLAN TO SUPPORT STUDENT PROJECT WORK

SAFETY INSTRUCTION - ISSUE 5 SEPTEMBER 2013

All undergraduate projects require a Safety Plan appropriate to their content which must be submitted before you begin any practical work. It is expected that you will consult with relevant staff to prepare this document, such as your supervisor, and, where relevant, technical staff. The Safety Plan should consider the safety implications associated with your project as you progress through from project conception through to completion. If you are carrying out a lengthy and/or practical based project, it may be that the Safety Plan will initially just make reference to relevant safe systems of work (SSOW) and risk assessments that will need to be completed before you start your practical work. The Plan can then act as an aide memoire and should be referred to as you progress and be updated to reflect the latest proposed activities and/or amended if circumstances have altered to the original plan.

For less complex or lower risk projects, the Safety Plan may be supported by all of the relevant SSOW and risk assessments from the start and these may be sufficient for the project duration. Having said that, reference to it now and again should still be carried out as your project progresses to check that you are still proceeding as originally intended in your Plan.

You should sign this document and pass it to your supervisor at or before the set deadline. Your supervisor will also sign the document (once they are deemed sufficient). If there are any omissions or errors at this time, your supervisor should point these out to you, for you to consider, amend your work and re-submit. Only once your supervisor is confident that you have captured relevant detail for now will they sign the document. Once this has been done, this copy must be pasted into your project logbook. Clearly, as the project evolves it may be necessary to modify the practical work from that originally envisaged. When such changes occur they must be preceded by a renewed SSOW and/or risk assessment and the submission, and agreement, of a revised Safety Plan. Updates to the Safety Plan must be fixed into the project logbook.

When developing your supporting SSOW, is it suggested that you break up your project into each activity as this should make things easier. A SSOW should be developed to cover each practical based aspect of the work that you intend to carry out in order to complete your project. [Note that they are ONLY required for aspects of the project where there is deemed to be significant risk]. For larger, more complex projects, a set of safe systems of work will be expected to support your Plan. In addition to these, you will need to consider any signficant hazards that may arise at each stage. If these cannot sufficiently be addressed within the SSOW, then a separate risk assessment will need to also accompany your Plan. If you find that you have to do this, it would be good practice if both the risk assessment and SSOW cross referenced one another. Any significant hazards identified will require you to devise ways of removing these to an acceptable level. You should consider redesigning your experiment or equipment, look at an alternative testing method, introduce engineering controls, introduce barriers or other protection devices, modify or generate some suitable safety procedures and/or consider the wearing of personal protective equipment as part of the process of looking at making it safer (and don't just consider yourself, you need to consider others too and other hazards that may impact on the building or facilities). There is a hierarchy of controls that the Health and Safety Executive recommend you follow when doing this. If you cannot devise a way of overcoming a significant hazard you will need to speak to your Academic Supervisor and/or Health and Safety Advisor to see if there is a possible practical solution. If not, then the work may be considered simply too dangerous and cannot be performed. Again, when completing risk assessments it is suggested that these are broken down into each task, particularly if the work that you intend to do is complex and multiple hazards may present themselves at each stage.

General risk assessments must be performed before each stage of the project is started as part of the design and planning stages. Each SSOW and risk assessment must be signed (your risk assessment must be approved if completed electronically) by the Academic supervisor. These should form the basis of a Health and Safety Appendix to the final report for ALL experimental/practical projects.

It is each student's responsibility to see that appropriate steps are taken to ensure that any practical work performed as part of the project is safe, seeking the appropriate support from your supervisor, technical or other staff as required.

A Safety Plan is required for all projects (even those that do not involve practical work). As a consequence of this, for those projects where the most signficant risks are associated with working at a computer, a guide has been developed to assist you to set up your workstation which will help you to mitigate risks whilst working at a display screen. Under these circumstances the Safety Plan should refer to a completed Display Screen Equipment risk assessment. This form has been specifically prepared for students to complete for their project work where working at a computer poses the most signficant risk and not for any other purpose. An alternative way of demonstrating your knowledge and awareness of health and safety within your project could be to consider the implications of your project should it be built, put into production, used in the environment within which it may be intended, considering the interface between the person and whatever the end product is for example. This may require some discussion with your academic supervisor as to how this information would be best prepared to fit within your project work.

Safety Plan - example of a safety plan document that may be used to support your Project Plan

SSOW - Safe Systems of work to support your Safety Plan

Risk Assessment - Risk Assessment guidance

Display Screen Equipment (DSE) Risk Assessment Guidance

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Guidance for Project Supervisors on the Management of Student Projects