As we get closer to 2024, water safety is still as relevant an issue as ever before. In fact, with certain waterborne illnesses on the rise, it appears that a range of organisations need to be seriously considering how they can improve their approach to water hygiene. Here, we go over some of the basic areas that all organisations need to be covering, from coming up with a water safety plan to having clear incident response protocols in place.
Water safety plan
Your organisation's water safety plan is what ties your overall approach to water safety together. Essentially, it will be where you decide how your organisation plans to deal with water safety related issues, from Legionella testing to checking for water leaks.
You will need to create a water safety group, within which individuals will be assigned certain roles and responsibilities. You may need help from a water hygiene specialist to get your plan up and running - a lot hinges on it functioning as intended.
Employee training
While you as a business owner will often ultimately be responsible for water safety in your organisation, you can ensure that your employees know what to look out for as well. You should seriously consider providing a base level of water training through either in person or online courses, so that everyone in your business knows the basics of water safety. This can massively increase the overall effectiveness of your approach, while helping to keep everyone safe.
Ongoing critical assessments
No approach will ever be perfect, and it's important that you create a plan that can change as needed. This should be based on constant ongoing critical assessments, where you assess how effective your current efforts are. With a dynamic environment such as a water system in a large building, things will constantly be changing - you want to be able to proactively change your approach based on these events, rather than react on a back foot.
Incident response plans
While you should take every measure available to you to avoid incidents from happening in the first place, you also need to have clear response protocols in place. What these are will differ depending on the business you're running; in some cases, if there's a serious issue with your water system, you may have to close down for a little while.
In other cases, it may be enough to provide access to safe drinking water through other means, without having to close the whole business down. You'll need to think these through before something actually happens, so that you're not left panicking.
Not a whole lot has changed when it comes to tackling water safety in 2024. Ultimately, you still need to put the same kind of system in place, ensuring that responsibility is clearly assigned within your organisation. The key takeaway should be that your approach must remain dynamic in the face of change. Based on regular risk assessments, you can work out what needs updating, to ensure that your approach remains as effective as possible in the long run.
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