As the Signed Safety at work project activities enter their final weeks, the Partners are publishing their Guidelines for Inclusivity and Diversity, a 100-page booklet comprising 13 chapters: This sets out the context for ensuring that Health and Safety practice in the workplace has a conscious reflection on policy and workplace communication for key officers in an organisation to secure the inclusive equality they seek, so that every worker is as safe (and feels as safe) as possible. For this, the Guidelines also address how the work of the Signed Safety at Work project can be utilised to this end.
The Guidelines aim to show new ways to address the needs of D/deaf people and recent migrants and others with communication challenges in the context of Health & Safety. To this end, the Partners publish this to inform members of various sectors, ones that we see as having a stake in a progressive adoption of Health & Safety practice through clear-sighted policy.
One set of professionals include Health & Safety policymakers and professionals working in organisations dedicated to improving practice, whether working in a dedicated Health-&-Safety organisation, a local authority, for a labour union, or for a network of organisations that have a direct interest in the implementation of Health-&-Safety policy.
The Guidelines also address employers that may be seeking new ways to upgrade their Health-&-Safety practice, including managers in HR departments in bigger organisations, specifically managers with responsibility for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) who can set out strategies for D/deaf, hearing-impaired and migrant employees to engage through available resources, such as our vocabulary, glossary and course.
The Guidelines are certainly a resource for the dedicated educators – Vocational Education and Training (VET) course developers, as well as VET providers. Also, they are for the organisers of groups in the voluntary sector who represent the D/deaf and migrant people that we see as the final beneficiaries of the project’s work, as well as those people as individuals who are engaged in such groups.
The research and analysis for these chapters were commissioned in terms of the aims and objectives of the project related to the value being added by the availability of the SSaW resources. There are five sections that include 13 chapters, with two or three chapters in each section, the sections having the following titles:
- The Professionalism of Occupational Health & Safety
- Recognising Qualifications in the Practice of Occupational Health & Safety
- Health & Safety for Deaf and Hearing-impaired Employees
- An Inclusive Approach to Occupational Health & Safety Training and Practice
- Effective Learning for Inclusive Occupational Health & Safety
In the context of increased workplace inclusion, the chapters consider further steps that may be taken for D/deaf and migrant employees to receive full and equal consideration in the context of Health & Safety policy implementation. The Partners wanted to be able to show professionals with a stake in these issues and the organisations for which they work that the SSaW resources could be applied easily.
These Guidelines are currently available from the SSaW project in English, and will soon also be available in Spanish, Italian, German and Czech language. We invite readers to request a copy by contacting us via email.
