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What is occupational health and safety?
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is the discipline of protecting the physical and mental wellbeing of people at work. It covers everything an organisation does to prevent work-related injury and ill health, from identifying hazards and assessing risks to reporting incidents, investigating their causes, and acting before harm occurs.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) and World Health Organisation define the aim of occupational health as promoting and maintaining the highest degree of physical, mental and social wellbeing of workers in every occupation. In practice, the “health” half of the term deals with conditions that develop over time, for example, stress, musculoskeletal disorders, exposure to harmful substances, while the “safety” half deals with the immediate risk of accidents and injury.
In the UK, occupational health and safety isn’t optional. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a legal duty on every employer to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees, and of anyone else affected by their work, so far as is reasonably practicable.
You’ll also see the same discipline called OSH (occupational safety and health – the ILO’s preferred order), workplace health and safety, or simply health and safety. They all describe the same thing.
Occupational health vs occupational safety: what’s the difference?
The two halves of OHS deal with different types of harm, on different timescales. Most reporting and prevention programmes need to cover both.
| Occupational health | Occupational safety |
| Protects against | Ill health that develops over time | Injury from accidents and incidents |
| Typical examples | Work-related stress, musculoskeletal disorders, occupational asthma, noise-induced hearing loss | Falls from height, machinery injuries, slips and trips, vehicle collisions |
| Timescale | Gradual - often months or years of exposure | Immediate - a single event |
| How it's measured | Ill-health cases, sickness absence, health surveillance data | Accident frequency rates, RIDDOR reports, lost time incidents, near misses |
The distinction matters for safety leaders because health risks are easy to under-report. An unguarded blade is visible, whereas rising stress or gradual hearing damage is not always. In 2024/25, work-related ill health accounted for 1.9 million cases in Great Britain – nearly three times the 680,000 workplace injuries recorded in the same period (HSE).
Why occupational health and safety matters
The most recent Health and Safety Executive (HSE) statistics for Great Britain (2024/25) show the scale of what OHS programmes exist to prevent:
- 124 workers were killed in work-related accidents
- 680,000 workers sustained a non-fatal injury
- 1.9 million workers suffered from work-related ill health, including 964,000 cases of stress, depression or anxiety
- 40.1 million working days were lost to work-related injury and ill health
- £22.9 billion – the estimated annual cost of workplace injury and new cases of ill health (2023/24)
Globally, the ILO estimates that nearly 3 million workers die from work-related accidents and diseases every year.
Behind the numbers, the case for OHS rests on three arguments:
- The moral case. Everyone who goes to work should come home safe and well. No output or deadline justifies preventable harm.
- The legal case. UK employers who fail in their duties face improvement and prohibition notices, unlimited fines and, in the most serious cases, prosecution of individual directors.
- The business case. Injuries and ill health cost money – absence, lost production, insurance premiums, recruitment and reputational damage. Organisations with strong safety performance consistently avoid those costs, and win work because of it.
Occupational health and safety law in the UK
Three pieces of legislation form the backbone of UK occupational health and safety:
- Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 – the primary law. It sets out the general duties employers owe to employees and the public, and employees owe to themselves and each other.
- Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 – makes the Act’s duties explicit: employers must carry out risk assessments, put control measures in place, and appoint competent people to manage safety. Organisations with five or more employees must record their assessments in writing.
- RIDDOR 2013 – the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations, which require employers to report specified workplace incidents to the regulator.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is Great Britain’s national regulator. It publishes the statistics above, enforces the law, and produces the guidance most organisations build their safety management approach on, including HSG65, Managing for health and safety.
Internationally, ISO 45001 is the recognised standard for occupational health and safety management systems. Certification isn’t a legal requirement, but many organisations adopt it to structure their OHS programme and demonstrate it to clients and regulators.
What does occupational health and safety cover? Examples
OHS programmes address five broad categories of workplace hazard:
- Physical hazards – the most visible risks: working at height, moving machinery, noise, vibration, electricity, workplace transport and slips and trips.
- Chemical hazards – harmful substances covered by COSHH: dusts, fumes, solvents, cleaning agents and asbestos.
- Biological hazards – bacteria, viruses and other agents, from healthcare exposure to legionella in water systems.
- Ergonomic hazards – poor manual handling, repetitive movements and badly designed workstations, which drive musculoskeletal disorders (511,000 cases in Great Britain in 2024/25).
- Psychosocial hazards – workload, working patterns and workplace relationships that cause stress, anxiety and depression. Now the single largest category of work-related ill health.
In practice, the day-to-day work of managing these risks includes risk assessments and method statements, audits and inspections, incident and near miss reporting, health surveillance, training, and tracking corrective actions through to close-out.
Who is responsible for occupational health and safety?
Employers hold the primary legal duty. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act, responsibility for OHS sits with the employer and, ultimately, with directors and senior leaders. It cannot be delegated away.
In practice, responsibility works at three levels:
- Leadership sets direction and is accountable in law. Directors who consent to or ignore failings can be prosecuted personally.
- Safety professionals and line managers run the system day to day: assessing risks, investigating incidents, monitoring performance and reporting to the board.
- Every employee has a legal duty to take reasonable care of their own health and safety and that of others, and to cooperate with their employer’s arrangements. A strong safety culture – where everyone reports hazards and near misses without fear of blame – is what turns that duty from paperwork into prevention.
How do safety leaders manage occupational health and safety proactively?
Mature OHS programmes follow the Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle set out in HSG65 and ISO 45001: plan your policy and risk profile, implement controls, measure performance, and act on what you learn.
What separates the best-performing organisations is what they measure. Counting accidents after they happen (lagging indicators) tells you where you’ve been. Leading indicators tell you where you’re heading: near miss reports, safety observations, inspection scores, action close-out rates and training completion.
A proactive approach looks like this:
- Make reporting effortless. If logging a hazard or near miss takes ten minutes on a desktop form, frontline workers won’t do it. Mobile reporting removes the friction.
- Investigate causes, not symptoms. Every incident and near miss has a root cause. Find it, and you prevent the next one.
- Track actions to close-out. An identified risk with an open action is a known failure waiting to happen.
- Report on trends, not totals. Safety dashboards that cut data by site, cause and severity turn monthly reporting from a chore into the evidence base for your next intervention.
How does Notify help organisations manage occupational health and safety?
Notify’s health and safety software gives health and safety teams the tools to run this proactive cycle in one place – mobile-first incident and near miss reporting, risk assessments, audits and inspections, action tracking, and real-time safety intelligence dashboards, with AI-powered technology to enhance incident investigations. More than 300,000 workers use Notify, and customers like Menzies Distribution Solutions have cut RIDDORs and lost time accidents by as much as 40%.
Book a demo to see how Notify helps you reduce accidents through proactive safety management.
FAQs
Nothing – they’re the same discipline with the word order reversed. OHS (occupational health and safety) is common in the UK, Canada, and Australia, while OSH (occupational safety and health) is used by the ILO, the EU, and the US agency OSHA. EHS and HSE add “environment” to the same remit.
Common examples include risk assessments, safety inductions and training, personal protective equipment (PPE), machine guarding, health surveillance, incident and near miss reporting, workplace inspections, and wellbeing programmes addressing stress and mental health. The right mix depends on the hazards your work involves.
It saves lives and protects livelihoods. In Great Britain alone, 124 workers were killed and 1.9 million suffered work-related ill health in 2024/25, costing the economy an estimated £22.9 billion a year (HSE). Beyond the legal duty, strong OHS performance reduces absence, protects reputation and improves productivity.
A structured framework – of policies, processes, data and responsibilities – for managing safety risks systematically rather than reactively. ISO 45001 is the international standard; HSE’s HSG65 guidance describes the same Plan, Do, Check, Act approach. Many organisations run theirs on dedicated safety management software.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) enforces the law in most workplaces in Great Britain, with local authorities covering lower-risk premises such as offices, shops and hospitality. In Northern Ireland, HSENI is the equivalent regulator. Enforcement ranges from improvement notices to prosecution.