Health and safety needs to be taken more seriously and not ridiculed - 22nd November 2009

Tom Mullarkey, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has used a report to the organisation’s annual meeting to call for a re-examination of what he says is the national hypocrisy on health and safety.

Mullarkey says that while swine flu is being taken seriously, work to reduce the number of people killed in accidents, a figure which is rising, is being hampered because of people generally seeing health and safety issues as examples of the ‘nanny state’ and media reports making fun of the topic.

He says in the report: “We seem to have developed a national hypocrisy on health and safety which needs to be re-examined. People are not surprised to see earthquakes, helicopter crashes or swine flu make the headlines but would only rarely; if they paused for thought, describe these events as health and safety issues. The use of NHS resources, how well we prepare our children for adulthood through the education system or the proliferation of alcohol abuse are all subjects which raise serious, intense debate but the links are rarely made with the underlying subject, which is only described in derisive terms.”

Mullarkey warns that people have to look seriously at health and safety issues and says that the media have to, “stop tilting at the windmills and get down to the serious business of supporting accident prevention”.

He is the latest high profile figure in the health and safety profession to call for an end to media distortion. John Holden, president of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, commented recently: “A diet of ridiculing stories in certain quarters of the national media is setting up health and safety as a great British joke.”

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