Pharmacy staff are always busy looking after everyone else, but is your working environment a safe and secure place for you, as well as your customers? 

 From violence against staff and issues of lone working to fire risks, trip hazards and dealing with poisonous substances at work, pharmacy employees can face more safety issues than other people working in a retail environment. According to the latest Health and Safety Executive annual statistics for Great Britain (2012-13), 148 workers were killed at work, a rate of 0.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers, and there were 78,222 other reported injuries to employees, a rate of 311.6 per 100,000 employees. For the same period, the annual British Retail Consortium retail crime survey found that the direct cost of crime to retailers was £511 million, with 631,391 incidents of customer theft reported in 2012-13, and thefts per 100 stores increasing by five per cent compared to 2011-12.

While employers have a responsibility to keep their staff safe, understanding the role that pharmacy staff can play in preventing and mitigating the risks of crime and accidents means you can help create a workplace that you, your colleagues and customers look forward to being in. “Employers have a duty of care to ensure there are procedures and policies in place to protect the safety of staff working within a pharmacy, but it is important that staff are aware of these polices, too, and know how to report concerns to the pharmacist/owner,” says Mimi Lau, Numark's director of pharmacy services.

“Any injury as a result of staff negligence will be hard to defend on the basis of ignorance. All incidents should be formally reported in the Incident Book and a full risk assessment made to ensure that the problem does not repeat itself. However, it is always better to prevent an incident from happening in the first place and often this requires some common sense!” says Mimi. “I would recommend that each pharmacy assigns a safety officer who can oversee these areas; they should be adequately trained to fulfil their role and have the ability to keep abreast of changes in legislation and be able to support staff in keeping safe.