Various forms of bacteria have posed a risk to human health for thousands of years. While a lot has obviously been done to increase sanitation in most areas of life, the risk posed by bacteria such as Legionella hasn’t gone away.
As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re mitigating these risks, to keep your customers and employees safe and maintain legal compliance. Here’s what you need to do.
What is Legionella?
Before we dive into prevention strategies, let’s take a quick look at what Legionella actually is. Legionella pneumophila is a bacteria that’s quite commonly found in natural water sources.
While it’s harmless in low concentrations, if it’s allowed to proliferate to high levels, when inhaled it can cause a dangerous form of atypical pneumonia called Legionnaires’ disease.
The disease is particularly dangerous to those with underlying health issues, and can sometimes be fatal.
Risk assessments
As with most risks, you’ll likely need to start your Legionella prevention strategy with a Legionella risk assessment. These will need to be carried out by a specialist third-party provider, who will come equipped with certain testing equipment.
They’ll carry out a range of tests throughout your premises, looking for areas in your water system that could potentially result in the rapid growth of the bacteria.
As the bacteria grow the fastest between 20-45 degrees Celsius in stagnant water sources, these will be the kinds of conditions that the testers look out for.
Implementing changes
Based on the results of your risk assessment, you’ll likely need to implement some changes.
In terms of practical measures you can take, this will involve making absolutely sure that there aren’t any water sources in your premises that are stored at the temperature range listed above.
You might also find that it’s beneficial to implement changes to company culture more generally. This could involve providing general training to all staff in the business, so that people know what kinds of risks to look out for.
Responsibility and water safety plans
While you absolutely have clear responsibilities as a business owner to identify and mitigate risks, with water safety, things get a bit more complicated.
As part of your overall approach, you’ll need to create and implement a water safety plan. This will involve assigning clear responsibilities to several people in the organisation, each person with a clearly defined role and set of expectations.
In the event that something does go wrong, this will often make it easier to identify who has carried out their role appropriately, and who may have missed something critical.
We hope this has clarified some of the main issues associated with Legionella prevention in business environments. It’s not too difficult to achieve, but it’s important that you take the right approach.
You’ll generally need help from an external service provider, both to carry out risk assessments and help you implement safety-related improvements in your organisation. The consequences of getting it wrong are simply too high to leave things to chance.
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