If you’ve been looking around for meaningful, fulfilling, and well-paying jobs, you’ve probably found quite a few people who laude the health and safety field.

Health and safety jobs are all of those things, and anyone who has the mental fortitude to deal with the stress accompanying extreme responsibility will absolutely love taking the health and safety career path.

However, you might not even know what it is. It’s not as renowned as the medical field, legal field, or law enforcement field.

Today, we’re going to take a moment to go over exactly what the health and safety field is, what its most common employee does, and why it’s important.

Let’s get started.

What is the Health and Safety Field?

Health and safety deals with maintaining safe conditions in establishments. The simplest example of this would be the health and safety officer at a construction site. In that situation, the health and safety officer would be responsible for ensuring that the workers are safe from themselves and workplace conditions. The officer may conduct Safety Critical Medicals (or hire an outside company to do this), material and soil testing, safety inspections, and similar examinations to ensure healthy working conditions. He may also conduct audits so that the company can abide by the guidelines and set standards for maintaining industrial and legal compliance.

What Do Health and Safety Officers Do?

Health and safety officers can have very different experiences in a day-to-day business depending on what type of business they’re serving. However, they all tend to have the same basic responsibilities.

Assess:

A health and safety officer’s role is pivotal in ensuring a secure workplace environment. Their primary responsibility involves conducting comprehensive workplace assessments. This entails physically inspecting the premises, closely monitoring employee behavior for unsafe practices, and meticulously checking critical equipment such as medical grade nitrous gas systems, nasal cannulas, portable suctions, and medical refrigeration systems to ensure proper functioning. Additionally, they ensure that the workplace adheres to all relevant regulations and standards, verifying compliance with codes and safety measures. Put simply, the officer’s keen eye is trained to identify anything that could be dangerous. This helps in maintaining a safe and compliant work environment, contributing to the well-being and security of employees.

Report:

If a health and safety officer does identify something concerning, it’s their job to provide a full report to the management team to ensure the leadership of the company has a chance to correct it.

Provide Guidance:

A health and safety officer is regarded as an expert on safety. If there are concerns, they are typically heavily involved in the process used to correct any possible mistakes that might be occurring. They’ll provide advice to management to find a solution, keep management’s mindset on track while discussing solutions, and generally perform as a sort of council for the management team on safety matters.

Investigate:

Let’s say something does happen on the job. Maybe a machine malfunctions and hurts an employee, or maybe an employee acts a bit reckless and nearly gets injured. It is the officer’s job to investigate the incident to determine exactly what happened, report that to management, and help guide the tea towards a solution.

Why Are Health and Safety Officers Important?

So, why are health and safety officers important? Can’t anyone look around for potential dangers? Well, no. They can’t. Health and safety officers are generally trained extremely well to spot things that most people wouldn’t and then find solutions to those problems.

Because of this, health and safety officers are some of the most important parts of the workforce; they put in the effort to ensure that everyone gets home safely after earning money for their family, and without them, there’d be a lot more workplace accidents.