The BSIF Safety Awards going forward

The brand image of health and safety has been tarnished over the years with much of the mainstream media only too happy to be sarcastic about the discipline, instead of celebrating the value that it delivers to the individual and to businesses country wide. The awards are our opportunity to recognise and champion the great work that the industry does.

Historically the BSIF Safety Awards have featured excellence in several categories.

• Product Innovation: Recognising products which are new and innovative and contribute clearly to improvements in occupational safety and health
• Safety Excellence: This is an award based on case studies created by entrants that illustrate specific initiatives that have been created in the workplace and describe the safety challenges that have been successfully overcome by the installation of the programme. The safety excellence award has to objectively describe, the before and after situation, and evidence the safety improvements delivered. This award enables the market to appreciate clearly that good proportionate well planned safety is good for the individual and good for business
• Service Awards: Recognising excellence in service based solutions provided by companies in the safety and health field. This award is judged by polling, by BSIF, of entrants’ customers, to establish independently who is providing leading edge innovative service.

For the first time the 2017 awards were presented at The Safety Event at the NEC held between the 21st and 23rd of March. The Product Innovations short listed entrants presented to a panel of industry experts in front of an audience of interested visitors to The Safety Event Exhibition. This created a fantastic atmosphere with the presenters able to highlight the benefits of their new products and also answer challenging questions from both the judges and members of the audience.

The BSIF Safety Awards really are a fantastic opportunity for those involved in safety and health to showcase their outstanding products, services and innovative safety practices, all of which contribute to making the UK the safest place to work in the developed world.

I am delighted to tell you that we are moving the Safety Awards forward. In 2018 the awards will be the centre piece of an evening event at the VOX, Resort World Birmingham, dedicated to celebrating safety excellence on a whole new level. The night will have more than 350 guests from the industry and the celebration will include a drinks reception, sumptuous three course meal live music and live entertainment and a comedy set from Rory Bremner, who will then host the Awards. This event is not to be missed and with this increase in scale will drive greater impact in the enhancement of the image of safety and health.

While the existing categories of excellence will remain there are several changes to be aware of for next year. Safety marketing and awareness programmes are a vital element of the industry and an important method of getting the key messages to the market. In order to recognise this we plan to have a new category recognising “Campaign Excellence”. This could be product specific or more general to include campaigns with highlight the safety issues that affect the Occupational Safety and Health market. There are many fantastic campaigns out there and it is essential that they are recognised.

We also plan to make some key changes to the way that the Product Innovation Award is organised. Currently all types of product compete with each other to illustrate what is new, novel, innovative and creates improvements to the users safety. This can mean the judges trying to evaluate products which are vastly different to each other, for example we could have gas detectors being presented alongside head protection product, and making a value judgement on their merits is exceedingly difficult. Going forward we plan to create product type categories within the awards where we can have categories for “Instruments” “Hand Protection” “Head Protection” “Hearing Protection” and so on. This development will allow innovations to be judged against similar new products launched on the market.

The Safety Industry is an industry to be proud of and we are really excited about these changes and so look forward to the 2018 event with great anticipation.

Alan Murray, BSIF chief executive