DDS International Promotional Video

Transcript

DDS International are Britain’s leading experts in health and safety compliance, offering a comprehensive consultancy service. Our global reach brings the same high standard of service to businesses across the globe and our local experts ensure you always stay legal.

At DDS International we specialise in providing a one stop shop for safety compliance. We aim to help organisation mange health and safety in a proactive and positive manner and we support the management teams to actually grow and ingrain the culture of health and safety compliance within their own organisation.

We current operate in around 38 countries and that’s growing because the international basis for many organisations is actually expanding quite rapidly.

There are different levels of training, the key element for training and awareness is making sure that the management have thought it through and its planned and it’s considered in terms of what you want to outcomes to be before you even start doing it.

From health and safety training perspective, the inductions or the initial briefings to the employees need to be relevant to the workplace in which they are working or the roles that they are expected to do. And in checking that, after the training has been delivered is to test the employees or to check their understanding so do you understand where the fire exits are? Do you understand where the assembly point is? And do you understand what a fire alarm sounds like? It’s actually making sure they understood that. So that’s a good and effective training at that sort of level.

As you build up knowledge and understanding and you get into more detailed areas of safety training and what’s required, such as first aid and things like that, there are accredited courses that employees can go on and a number of organisations that offer accreditation such as the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, IOSH and Highfield. They offer NVQ Level 2, Level 3, Level 4 or training courses that we can deliver as a training centre. We help organisations to take safety compliance and manage that in a really simple, effective and a robust manner and we do that by the creation of management support and an online risk management tool and providing the expertise as and when an organisation needs it to see the way through the safety minefield as it were.

What’s really key for us and really important for us is the ethics and integrity that go with what we do. What we want to do is to make sure when we are working with an organisation, it’s a development of a long-term relationship between us and the client. What we want to do is to develop that proactive partnership but we working with our clients to actually build a culture of compliance within their own organisation that doesn’t build a culture of dependence on DDS. So, the ethical part from the DDS perspective and the integrity of what we do is really, really important. What we don’t do is go into an organisation and say is you need this, you need that, you need that and then go and deliver that and walk away and say we don’t need to see you any more, see you later, thanks very much bye bye. This is about taking a long-term view to helping clients to management their compliance ongoing.

DDS International pride ourselves on offering a truly complete health and safety consultancy. We offer complete training and support packages that cover all areas of compliance including fire, food safety and first aid. Our PYRAMID™ Risk Management System provides one simple location to manage all your documentation, risk assessments, reporting and monitoring needs. With remote access, you can monitor your workplace in real time and react instantly to any incidents.

On a fundamental basis for health and safety legislation in the UK is obviously the health and safety at work act and also the management of health and safety at work regulations. We also had the introduction of the corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide act, a lot of people forget about the fire safety order in 2005 as well which is fundamentally a key part of the fire safety legislation. This is an interesting one because as soon as you introduce the word safety in discussion with many employers or business owners, a lot of people think it’s going to add a burden and a bureaucracy to our business and therefor is going to cause a lot of problems in terms of cost, it’s going to slow things down and therefore it’s seen as a barrier, a problem, to expanding their business. Fundamentally, good health and safety management starts with the directors and owners of the business and setting that leadership and the organisation objectives and a good business or a good director will always take health and safety and ingrain that as part of the organisational culture as it grows. So if you start from the beginning with a safety culture and you’ve got good leadership in place, good management, involve the workers because the workers are fundamental to the whole process and your employees, because they do the job, they carry out the work the organisation does on a day to day basis.

Health and safety is sometimes seen as being separated from your business’s core activities but this couldn’t be further from the truth. A culture of safety makes a direct contribution to your bottom line because a safe workplace is always more productive. Confident, well trained employees are the most effective and they stay effective never contributing to costly injuries or incidents. Health and safety is key to your business running effectively and ensures that you get the best performance from your staff.

From an ethical point of view and an integrity point of view, what we do at DDS is really important so besides having the organisation independently accredited to various standards, all of our consultants and team members operating in this area must be experts in their own field or must have received the appropriate level of training that’s commensurate to their role to discharge their duties. Within that sort of framework every member of my team has a personal development plan and as part of the personal development plan will require them to attend courses and ongoing continual professional development in the areas for which they specialise. If we’ve got a good safety management system in place and an organisation has a good health and safety management system in place, it needs to be operated by the people at the grass roots level who are actually doing the job, so it can’t fall and break over at that level and likewise it needs to be a real time system so it needs to be effective at actually flagging issues to senior management as and when there’s a problem and providing compliance reports when it’s needed.