Last week Duncan and I shared a stand at the Improving Safety, Health and Wellbeing at Work event at Cardiff City Stadium. This is an annual event organised by the South Wales Safety Groups Alliance, the 2018 event was attended by over 300 delegates with 35 trade stands and 6 presentations on health and wellbeing topics.

Duncan Tincello from Mapadillo and I shared a stand as we are collaborating to develop his map-based software for health and safety applications. We had considered the theme of the show and provided a large, colourful bowl of fruit which proved quite a conversation starter and was much healthier than the standard Haribo usually available at trade shows!

We spoke to various people from a wide range of work places including insurance, local authorities, higher education, construction, utilities and waste management. It was interesting to talk to people about the range of industries and locations that Mapadillo would be suitable for and we are planning to follow up these initial conversations over the next week or so.

We also managed to attend some of the presentations, ‘Hand Arm Vibration – all you need to know’ presented by Jim Maccall of Training for Hire (‘Trainer by day, publican by night’) was the funniest and most memorable presentation I have seen on a such a serious and potentially life changing topic. ‘Anti Stigma Campaign in relation to workplace mental health’ was an interesting presentation from Lowri Wyn Jones, Programme Manager of Time to Change Wales and echoed many of the themes from the recent Bristol IOSH branch meeting on the Jaguar Land Rover mental health campaign ‘Let’s have the conversation’. Both of these presentations provided information on dealing with mental health issues at work and getting sometimes difficult conversations started – I was surprised to find out that 1 in 4 people will suffer a mental health issue in Wales which costs the Welsh economy £7.2 billion.

‘An insurance perspective on health and wellbeing’ from Paul Cusition from UMAL (a mutual organisation) was interesting. Paul provided a list of records / information / documents which would be required to decide liability in the event of an insurance claim – all which can be visually linked to a plan of your site in Mapadillo:

• Inspection reports
• Secure CCTV and photos
• Risk assessments
• Method statements
• Training records
• Incident reports