Management of health and safety at work
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) asks businesses to:
- Assess risks in the workplace
- Consult with and involve employees
- Take suitable precautions to avoid risk
- Review and revise risk assessments as necessary.
Risk assessment
A risk assessment should be performed for any potentially hazardous procedure and should:
- Identify the hazard
- Identify who is at risk as a result of the hazard
- Classify the seriousness of the risk: insignificant, minor or major
- Assess the probability of the hazard occurring: unlikely, likely or very likely
- Assess any risk to health
- Assess any risk to the environment
- Identify who is responsible for the task or area
- Identify what control measures are already in place
- Identify what protective clothing or equipment is used
- Assess whether any special procedures are needed for first aid, fire, spillage or storage
- Assess whether current control measures are satisfactory
- If not, identify what additional controls are needed
- Identify when and by whom these control measures will be implemented and the date of the next review.
The areas of risk that need to be assessed in the dispensary include:
- General medicines handling
- Handling cytotoxic drugs
- Spillage of medicines
- Manual handling: accessing high shelves, moving drug order, etc.
- Trip hazards
- Waste disposal.
A risk assessment should be carried out for each of these activities, preferably by the staff directly involved, and reviewed annually. As a result of the risk assessment, standard operating procedures (SOPs) should be drawn up and staff trained in their use.
Control of substances hazardous to health
Under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations 2002, practices should assess the risk to health and safety from veterinary medicines and other substances used in the practice.
Drugs and substances should be classified according to risk:
Low- and medium-risk substances
Low- and medium-risk substances can be grouped by therapeutic group, type or route of administration. Standard measures to control exposure can be used for the whole group; examples of groups include:
- Antibiotics
- Vaccines
- Injectable anaesthetics
- Inhalation anaesthetics
- Steroids
- Disinfectants.
Any specific risks within the groups must be identified (e.g. allergy to penicillin).
High-risk substances
High-risk substances must have an individual detailed assessment. These substances include:
- Oil-based vaccines
- Cytotoxic drugs
- Glutaraldehyde disinfectants
- Hormones
- Tilmicosin.
Measures to control exposure to these high-risk substances must be explained to staff.
Summaries of product characteristics
- Safety data must be available for all drugs stocked. Drug companies no longer have to supply safety datasheets but many manufacturers still do and some can be found in the NOAH datasheet compendium available from The National Office of Animal Health.
- All veterinary authorized products have a summary of product characteristics (SPC). These are available from the Veterinary Medicines Directorate. The product database is arranged alphabetically and clicking on the chosen product brings up a link to its SPC. All veterinary medicinal products currently authorized in the UK plus homeopathic products and specified feed additives, and a list of suspended or recently expired products are included in this database.
- For non-veterinary authorized drugs (e.g. human prescription-only medicines) used under the prescribing cascade, SPCs can be found online at www.emc.medicines.org.uk or in copies of the ABPI compendium of datasheets, which are supplied to doctors, pharmacists and nurses and can be purchased from www.medicines.org.uk
- Disinfectants and cleaning chemicals need to have material safety datasheets (MSDS) under the Chemicals (Hazard Information and Packaging for Supply) (CHIP) Regulations 2009 known as CHIP4. These Regulations require manufacturers to give information about the hazards to their customers. Suppliers generally provide this information on the package itself, usually on the label. Safety datasheets laws have been transferred to the European Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) Regulations, and manufacturers no longer have to provide a safety datasheet if there is sufficient safety information available to the user supplied with the product.