Regardless of how big or small your event is, event safety is crucial. Certain measures and procedures need to be considered and should take place to plan and conduct a successful safe event. Event safety could include various issues that need to be dealt with in a certain to ensure the safety of everyone involved in the overall event. Within this blog post expect to discover the basics of planning a safe event, implementing certain health and safety measures and overall the best practices for event safety.
The Basics Of Planning A Safe Event
Safety plan/Risk Assessment
Conducting a risk assessment is an essential part of event planning. Every factor needs to be taken into consideration and a backup solution must be created for each one if one doesn’t go to plan. This includes assessing all the hazards and issues that could arise and coming up with solutions about how you can mitigate them.
According to the HSE, the minimum you are obliged as a business is as follows. Firstly identify what could cause injury or illness when conducting the event secondly decide how likely it is that someone could be harmed and how seriously they could be harmed by all of the hazards identified. Lastly, take action to eliminate the hazard or try to minimise/control it.
Some hazards you may need to consider when performing a risk assessment for you could include:
- Food and drink – how will you deal with food allergies? How will you prevent cross-contamination? How can we prevent food waste?
- Crowd Management – How will aggressive/inappropriate behaviour be dealt with?
- Environment – How can we help to minimise waste production? What measures can we take to ensure that we minimise the carbon footprint for our overall event?
- Staff – Are all the staff trained properly? In which ways/What will you do to ensure the safety of your event staff and how will you protect them from occupational hazards whilst they are doing their job?
- First aid – What injuries may the customers face? How will these be dealt with? How many trained first aiders will need to be present in the event?
- Fire – Does the venue have an appropriate Fire Emergency Evacuation Plan and a Fire Procedure?
- Weather – How will the weather on the date of the event affect the attendees? What will have to happen during adverse weather conditions?
Trained Staff
All event staff should be trained with the necessary skills and knowledge for their role. Training is essential as it will allow the staff to understand what is expected of them and it will teach them how they should be working allowing them to provide the best service. If staff are not trained to a good standard then this could result in them being at risk of encountering occupational hazards whilst they are working. It could also mean that they are not working well enough which could lead to the displeasure of attendees leading them to have negative reviews for your business.
Assessing and Choosing venues
When choosing a venue it is vital that you carefully assess its suitability. This means ensuring that the venue is safe and acceptable for attendees to enjoy whilst they are attending and for the staff to work well within. Choose a venue that is appropriate for your audience and the type of event that you are hosting. It is also important to consider when you will be hosting that event, so as an event organiser you can, accommodate the weather. Another factor that should be considered when you are choosing a venue is ensuring that they have the appropriate facilities, for instance ensuring that there is nearby public transport. Likewise, make sure how far are the nearby emergency service in case of an accident/emergency. If you consider these factors it will help you to choose the most suitable venue for your event.
Event Equipment
When planning a safe event you must be considering the risks of the equipment that will be used. At times certain pieces of equipment can pose a safety hazard creating a risk for your attendees.
Liaising with everyone
To ensure event safety, communication and working as a team are very important. It is key that everyone is on board and everyone understands what will be happening when it will be happening and how it will be happening. You need to work with everyone and make decisions as a team to ensure that no one’s safety is compromised.
Data management
When it comes to event safety it’s not only the physical factors that you need to consider, you also need to consider factors such as the safety of data that you will be collecting from your users/attendees. When planning the event it is important that you create a plan for how you will be collecting, using and storing data to protect you as a business and to ensure that all the data that you collect is stored safely. It is important that once the event is completed all the data that was collected is purged or you need to make sure that you are very transparent with your customers about how you will be storing and using their data.
Emergency Plan
Regardless of how much you plan or however many precautions you take, the likelihood of something going wrong will never be 0%. Therefore a backup emergency plan ensures that you have a solution on hand in the event of an emergency. If you would like to read more about having a backup plan and tips for when you are creating one, read our blog post where we talk about the importance of having a plan b for your event!
Overview
Hopefully, this short read has further emphasised the importance of event safety. Leaving you to understand the importance of taking time to carefully plan and organise your events making sure that you pay just as much attention as you will be when you are planning to make the event enjoyable.
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