5th December 2005, 10:49 AM
One of my staff s currently on maternity leave. As soon as she announced her pregnancy last year we had to produce a risk-assessment. In effect she did the risk assessment and then I went through it with her. This then went to our HR department and on her personnel file.
This seemed fine and fair enough to me, and indeed perfectly reasonable. The main areas where her role was limited was in manual handling and heavy work and particular areas of standing building recording. This was progressive and we looked at different effects on her work at different stages of pregnancy.
Other people posting on this thread seem to think that the main areas of concern would be risks brought on by contaminants etc. However these are risks to all workers and not confined to women, so no worker should be exposed to them anyway.
What actually [u]is</u> bizarre is some months ago at a health and safety training session I was told that I should produce a pregnant workers' risk assessment for [u]every woman</u> on my staff regardless of whether they were pregnant or not 'just in case'. Because technically if they were pregnant and something happened for which a risk assessment had not been done and they decided to sue... (even if they had not informed me that they were pregnant!!!)
I thought that was bizarre.
But a Pregnant Workers Risk Assessment is in my view entirely reasonable.
This seemed fine and fair enough to me, and indeed perfectly reasonable. The main areas where her role was limited was in manual handling and heavy work and particular areas of standing building recording. This was progressive and we looked at different effects on her work at different stages of pregnancy.
Other people posting on this thread seem to think that the main areas of concern would be risks brought on by contaminants etc. However these are risks to all workers and not confined to women, so no worker should be exposed to them anyway.
What actually [u]is</u> bizarre is some months ago at a health and safety training session I was told that I should produce a pregnant workers' risk assessment for [u]every woman</u> on my staff regardless of whether they were pregnant or not 'just in case'. Because technically if they were pregnant and something happened for which a risk assessment had not been done and they decided to sue... (even if they had not informed me that they were pregnant!!!)
I thought that was bizarre.
But a Pregnant Workers Risk Assessment is in my view entirely reasonable.