Research Essentials

Over the course of my career, I have completed many (10 to 20) health and safety assessments. I score 100%. Today was no exception.

Perhaps it is due to workload, but I am reluctant to waste 30 minutes doing repeated health and safety assessments with associated tedious tutorials. However, after ignoring the most recent request I got the “Failure to comply” email

Reluctantly I put myself through the slow tutorials. Having done it so many times below, I was limited only by the speed at which the little animations displayed. I worked out the fastest way to get through the tutorial. I really hate the way the tutorial delays the display of the buttons to allow you to move to the next step for a period of time that it assumes you need to read the text and/or perform the little formative test. I know the answers so I merely skim-read the text and was waiting to move on. Finally I got to the test-proper, completed it and received my usual 100%

This technique got the process down to a mere 20 minutes.

However reading the final report, it had a few action points – a suggested further assessment because I work at several locations (including my home office), and a requisition for a docking station for my laptop with separate keyboard.

I don’t want either, so I checked the boxes to say that these actions were complete and ended up with an “all green” report.

I understand and approve of adhering to Health and Safety guidelines. But I am insulted by the fact that the process appears to assume that I cannot remember these guidelines from one year to the next. I was able to reduce the time spent on this assessment to just under 20 minutes. It was a wasted 20 minutes. I did not learn anything that I did not already know (as shown by the usual 100% score).

I do know that I get eye ache from my work, quite badly because I’ve worked with computers for some years and although I can score 100% on the Health and Safety assessment, this does not mean that I remember to incorporate the guidelines into my own practice. Sometimes there just isn’t enough time to break off and give your eyes a rest. This is probably more of a workload issue than a health and safety one, but forcing me to spend an unnecessary 20 minutes in front of a screen doing the H&S assessment does not help.