Health and safety rules for offshore industry change

The HSE has released an announcement for new regulations for the oil and gas industry, most particularly the offshore industry.  It was stated by the HSE that any health and safety incident would need to be reported only if the worker is off work for seven days or more.  In other words, if the incident is a small cut that does not affect the worker for more than the time it takes to get a bandage then it does not need to be reported.

The Health and Safety regulator wants to see North Sea safety regulators provide incident reports that are meaningful rather than those that could be nothing more than a small incident.  Before the change to seven days, the regulations stated that any incident that occurred that required three (3) days from work would need to be reported.  This does not change the records that need to be kept.  Actually, the offshore facilities need to keep records of any incident that takes a worker out for three days; they just do not have to report it as they once did.  In this way, nothing will change in enforcing safety at work.  Employers have to follow the EU rules in terms of recording incidents at work.  The EU laws state that a record of all workplace incidents of three days or longer must be recorded.  Any incident that affects a person’s work and may have long lasting effects must also be recorded.