HSL: Biological Monitoring for Chemical Exposures at Work – Buxton, 9 Mar 2017

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HSL is to run a 1/2 day course on Biological Monitoring for Chemical Exposures at Work.

9 March 2017

Biological monitoring is a useful tool for occupational hygiene and health professionals. It is based on the analysis of hazardous substances or their metabolites in urine, blood or breath, and is used to assess chemical exposures by inhalation, ingestion and absorption through the skin.

Biological monitoring is particularly valuable where substances may be absorbed through the skin or where control of exposure relies on personal protective equipment. It can also be used to investigate the behavioural aspects of exposure controls.

This workshop is an overview of biological monitoring and how it can enhance the service that occupational hygiene and health professionals offer.

  • An introduction to biological monitoring.
  • Practicalities – how to establish a biological monitoring programme.
  • View from a practitioner – using biological monitoing to assess chemical exposures.
  • Practical session – small group working using a case study.
  • Interpreting results – understanding and acting on the results received.

The workshop is designed for occupational hygiene and health providers who are interested in what biological monitoring can do for them and their clients and for company employees specifically responsible for worker health protection.

Comments & Feedback
“Excellent, well worth the time.”
Andrew Booth, RPS Business Healthcare

The course will be run at the HSL laboratory in the spa town of Buxton. Buxton is in the heart of the Peak District and has good links to mainline train stations and Manchester International Airport.

Details of hotels in the Buxton area can be found at www.visitbuxton.co.uk

Cost

The cost of this course is £295 per person (includes course notes, takeaway lunch and refreshments).  A special offer is available to those attending the Measurement of Hazardous Substances course.

Book Course

Please note the invoice option is not available within 4 weeks of the course date, or for overseas customers.  If you are selecting the invoice option for payment, it will be mandatory to input a purchase order/reference number as we are unable to process booking forms without this.

For further dates and additional information email: training@hsl.gsi.gov.uk or contact the Training & Conferences Unit
at HSL directly on +44 (0)1298 218806.

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HSL: Behaviour Change: Achieving Health & Safety Culture Excellence – Buxton, 28 Feb – 1 Mar 2017

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HSL is to run a 2 day course on Behaviour Change: Achieving Health & Safety Culture Excellence.

28 February – 1 March 2017

Not all risks can be engineered out of the work environment.  Even with the best plans, procedures and systems in place, individuals at work still take short cuts and make mistakes. Sometimes risk-taking behaviour is intentional, for whatever reason. In other cases, risks may be taken due to a lack of understanding about a particular hazard, associated controls or inadequate training. To individual workers, such risk-taking can result in injury, ill-health and fatalities. To the organisation, some of the many costs can include lost time, damage to machinery, litigation, and prosecution. If unchecked, these costs can escalate.

This course, delivered by HSL psychologists, will provide you with an understanding of the many factors that influence both workers’ and managers’ behaviour. It will also highlight the strengths and weaknesses of traditional behaviour modification strategies for correcting unsafe and unhealthy behaviour, highlighting why such approaches may have limited impact. The course adopts a holistic approach to health and safety cultural improvement using behaviour change techniques (incorporating HSL’s ASCENT – Achieving Safety Culture Excellence Now and Tomorrow programme) and concludes with strategies to help reduce the likelihood of risk taking behaviour for health and safety. It differs from other courses on this topic by demonstrating how behaviour change, leadership and worker engagement can be incorporated into the wider health and safety management system to ensure an integrated, and therefore more effective approach to risk management. In doing so, both the immediate and underlying causes of risk-taking can be tackled head on. These strategies apply as much to manager behaviour as they do to operational staff.

  • Why people take risks at work
  • The consequences of risk taking for individuals and the organisation
  • How to prepare an organisation for a health and safety cultural improvement programme
  • Assessing safety culture and safety climate – use and follow up of the Safety Climate Tool
  • Strategies for influencing senior management
  • Factors that influence behaviour outlining HSL’s model of behaviour change
  • Human failure: errors and violations
  • Strategies to identify the root cause of behaviours
  • Evidence based strategies to encourage safer and healthier behaviour, e.g.
  • Evaluating your programme and maintaining change

The course is most appropriate for health and safety managers with limited knowledge / experience of behaviour change approaches. However, it will also be relevant to those who have established behaviour change initiatives but are interested in how the psychological priniciples of human behaviour can be mapped onto an integrated health and safety management system.

In our experience whilst this course will prepare delegates to develop and implement a behaviour change programme, organisations often find that they want the security of having HSL experts available to support them through the process and help them tailor the approach to meet their current context, culture maturity level and audience.

We will advise and guide you, ‘sense check’ your ideas and trouble shoot problems that arise by drawing on our wealth of expertise (both theoretical and practical) and experience of applying such a process in organisations across industry.  Our knowledge of what has and has not worked previously for other organisations can be invaluable.

HSL experts can provide a variety of ‘next step’ solutions to help kick start your health and safety cultural programme, including:

1. Delivery of a one hour presentation to your senior management team outlining HSL’s ASCENT approach to achieving safety culture excellence.

2. A two hour facilitated exercise encouraging the SMT to develop an organisational vision and associated values.  Alternatively, HSL can provide you with a training/facilitation pack allowing you to run the exercise.

3.  A workshop to explore your leadership capability to deliver a change programme.

4. Facilitated ‘ask the expert’ session affording you and your team an opportunity to ask a member of the HSL safety culture team direct questions about your issues and support in developing your approach.

5. Facilitated action planning session using gap analysis to identify what you are currently doing for each of the 5 steps in the ASCENT process and identify what actions you might consider taking.

For further information and pricing on this post event consultation, please email jane.hopkinson@hsl.gsi.gov.uk

The course will be run at the HSL laboratory in the spa town of Buxton. Buxton is in the heart of the Peak District and has good links to mainline train stations and Manchester International Airport.

Details of hotels in the Buxton area can be found at www.visitbuxton.co.uk

Cost

The cost of the course is £825 per person (includes course notes, lunch and refreshments).

Comments & Feedback
“Excellent course, professionally presented, that provided a range of ideas and approaches as to how we can modify behaviour.”
Chris Huckle, Rothamsted Research (North Wyke)

Book Course

Please note the invoice option is not available within 4 weeks of the course date, or for overseas customers.  If you are selecting the invoice option for payment, it will be mandatory to input a purchase order/reference number as we are unable to process booking forms without this.

For further dates and additional information email: training@hsl.gsi.gov.uk or contact the Training & Conferences Unit
at HSL directly on +44 (0)1298 218806.

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News story: Britain, coalition and Iraqi forces to maintain momentum in campaign against Daesh, Defence Secretary says

Speaking in Iraq, where local Iraqi and Coalition forces recently scored a major victory in the fight against Daesh in eastern Mosul, Sir Michael welcomed the progress made in defeating Daesh in Iraq.

Sir Michael saw how Britain’s commitment to training Iraqi forces, which was stepped up last year is having an effect in the fight against Daesh. Numbers of Iraqi Security Forces trained by UK and Coalition personnel has increased threefold since October 2016, with around 3,000 Iraqi forces now being trained every month, 10,000 troops have been trained since the end of October 2016, increasing the Iraqi force’s skills and ability to defeat Daesh.

With operations to clear the western approaches to Mosul already underway, Sir Michael met with the Prime Minister, President and Defence Minister of Iraq, and the Prime Minister and other representatives of the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq, to take review campaign progress and planning

During his visit, Sir Michael also met with UK personnel training Iraqi security forces. Britain leads the Coalition’s training programme in Iraq, and so far has helped to train nearly 40,000 troops. The training in countering improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is proving to be vital, as Daesh have booby trapped many parts of eastern Mosul during its occupation. Iraqi forces have been using their training to dispose of these crude devices, allowing their forces to advance and civilians to safely return to their homes. This training will also prove essential when forces move into the heavily mined and densely populated neighbourhoods of western Mosul.

The liberation of eastern Mosul marked a major victory for Iraqi forces, who Sir Michael praised for their patient and deliberate operation, taking care to minimise the risk to civilians. The RAF also played an important role in the Iraqi victory, providing sustained close air support to Iraqi troops. RAF Reaper aircraft played a particularly vital role, delivering precision attacks on Daesh extremists engaged in street fighting, while also using its advanced sensors to alert Iraqi ground forces to the presence of civilians.

Residents in eastern Mosul are already returning to their homes, with over 29,000 having done so in recent weeks. The liberation has also enabled more than 23,000 children to return to school and continue their education.

Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said:

Iraqi forces, supported by Britain and the Coalition, have made strong progress in the fight against Daesh. We’re keeping up the momentum with operations to liberate western Mosul due to start shortly.

This will be a more complex fight in a densely populated urban environment. Britain will continue playing its part providing precision strikes, vital intelligence, and training Iraqi forces to deal with explosive devices planted by Daesh.

Sir Michael also announced that Britain will send a UK military officer to help lead NATO’s newly established training mission in Iraq, from July this year. The new NATO training and capacity building team will help the Iraqis in dealing with the threats they face, including to counter Daesh improvised explosive devices. The UK has already contributed £1 million to help establish NATO’s presence in Baghdad, which will provide expert advice on defence issues to the Iraqi Government.



Survey finds ‘Jurassic Park’ in E. China

As many as 82 dinosaur fossil sites were confirmed by experts from Zhejiang Province between 2006 and 2013.[Photo: zjww.gov.cn]

East China’s Zhejiang Province was a “Jurassic Park” with a wide variety of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period, according to findings of a six-year survey.

A total 82 dinosaur fossil sites, with at least six dinosaur species and 25 types of fossil dinosaur eggs, were confirmed during the survey by a joint team of experts from the Zhejiang Institute of Hydrogeology and Engineering Geology and Zhejiang Museum of Natural History, between 2006 and 2013.

The research recently won a second-class award from the Ministry of Land and Resources.

Scientists identified eight new species among the fossils.

The survey covered an area of 11,000 square kilometers in Zhejiang,

Scientists have used various research techniques ranging from geology, paleobiology to chronostratigraphy, combined with site inspections and excavations in their study, making it the most comprehensive research on dinosaur fossils in the province to date.

“It has been proved that a large quantity of dinosaurs lived in Zhejiang during the Cretaceous period, about 65 million to 145 million years ago,” said Jin Xingsheng, deputy curator of Zhejiang Museum of Natural History. “Compare with other southeastern provinces, Zhejiang has the largest amount of dinosaur fossils.”

Their discoveries also give evidence to the general thought that a comet or asteroid impact caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs.

Scientists found that sedimentary rocks, where most dinosaur fossils were unearthed, were sanwiched between two layers of volcanic rocks, indicating vegetation was lush and suitable for dinosaurs in the early and middle Cretaceous period.

The evidence showed a catastrophe in the late Cretaceous period might have ended the age of prehistoric creatures. Scientists believed the hit of an asteroid was the most likely reason as it can result in a series of sudden climate changes such as volcanic eruptions, crustal faults and generate radioactive substances that cause the dinosaurs to die out.



Beijing, neighboring regions to see heavy air pollution

A new round of air pollution is expected to hit Beijing and parts of northern and eastern China due to unfavorable weather conditions, the China National Environmental Monitoring Center has warned.

Apart from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, which is expected to see heavy pollution from Feb. 12 to 15, air quality in more than 20 cities in provinces such as Shandong and Henan is forecast to deteriorate from Feb. 14 to 15 due to unfavorable weather conditions.

A cold front is expected to help disperse the pollution on Feb. 16.