News: Council Fined after Deaths; First Aid Training; Bullying Bosses

Bosses Being Bullies

A recent study has found that line managers are those mostly likely to be reported to Human Resources for bullying their staff. The most typical form of bullying was being undermined or given an unreasonable and unrealistic amount of work to do.

A vast 83% of employees were reported to have complained about bullying or harassment at work, whether that was physical intimidation, sexual harassment, bullying or offensive emails. This type of work environment can lead to stress and low staff morale, and the distress it causes can even extend to putting strain on a person's home life.

Relationships at work can be severely impacted by bullying, and Charlotte Wolff from XpertHR, an online resource for employment law and Human Resources good practice advisess that, “giving managers appropriate training, and running employee awareness campaigns can effectively reduce the problem. We also found that the use of mediation, during an informal investigatory process, is the most effective way to tackle cases once they have been exposed”.

Compulsory First Aid Training Recommendation

First Aid Hints | SG World Getting help in the time it takes between somebody having an accident or falling ill and the arrival of professional help, can have a dramatic impact on whether or not a person survives.

Knowing what to do if somebody has a heart attack, is bleeding or injured or involved in a car accident can make a real difference, yet many of us feel unequipped to deal with such an emergency.

As Kathleen Northridge explains in LiveStrong, “It takes the brain six minutes to die once oxygen is cut off. It can take a person as little as five minutes to bleed to death. Bones that are not set, may never hold weight. Cuts that are not cleaned can become infected. In the minutes after a trauma, how the body is treated can make a world of difference to the outcome, and time is of the essence”.

A petition has been drawn up by Aid Training calling for compulsory first aid training in schools, after they found that four out of every five school pupils they surveyed stated they would feel safer if they felt confident that they knew what to do in an emergency.

Despite schools in Wales and Northern Ireland having to teach first aid skills to their pupils, those in England and Scotland have no such obligation, so the petition is calling for the law to be changed so that every child in the country will feel safe in the knowledge that they can cope with unexpected injuries in people around them.

Council Fire Fighter Death Fine

Warwickshire County Council has been fined £30,000 for failings in relation to how they kept records and provided information when John Averis, Ashley Stephens, Darren Yates-Badley and Ian Reid died fighting a fire at a warehouse at Atherstone-on-Stour in 2007.

The Judge is said to have agreed that the Council has since made significant improvements and is a “model fire authority” since the deaths, which became the biggest loss of firefighters' lives in 30 years. The Judge also declined to add costs onto the amount of the fine, pointing out that the money would come from the public purse.

(Image Credit: Mary Margret)

 
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