23 Nov Health and safety

We have recently launched a new process to gather health and safety information relating to TB testing. Previously, upon notification from TOM that a health and safety event had occurred on a test part, Farmcare would contact the practice for a full incident report. We now send a short questionnaire, as the first step, to establish key information about the vent. This questionnaire takes only a couple of minutes to complete and we use the answers to determine if a full incident report is required. We hope this will encourage practices to report more near-misses, knowing that there is not always going to be a lengthy process to follow. Having more data means we can describe in better detail the risks of TB testing and try to drive changes and improvements.

We recently asked all practices to sign a health and safety declaration regarding our system of flags on TOM to indicate where there may be health and safety issues on a holding. Once all declarations have been returned, we intend to share a full list with each practice of all of their holdings that have a flag. We anticipate that this will be a useful reference point for practices.