The origin of this book is the compelling evidence that a high proportion of machinery-related deaths and injuries are attributable to genuine and serious risks originating within machine design and construction. This trend continues despite significant legal obligations, notably the European regulatory regime giving effect to the Machinery Directive (among others), and a substantial body of specialist knowledge originating in the disciplines of human factors and safety engineering. Grounded in empirical research with machinery manufacturers, this book aims to elucidate the factors and processes shaping firms’ performance for machinery safety, and considers their compatibility with legal obligations. Through a unique blending of rich empirical data coupled with safety, human factors, socio-legal and learning scholarship, the book provides both a nuanced account of firms’ performance for machinery safety, and makes conceptual and theoretical contributions to understanding and explaining their performance. Specifically, the book elucidates the role of knowledge and motivational factors - and how these are constituted - in shaping firms’ performance. It reveals the multiple state and non-state influences that create plural responses among manufacturing firms, which typically operate in supply chains and networks, and often globally. These insights provide the foundations to enhance regulatory design, and the book’s conclusion recommends some innovative directions for regulatory interventions to sustain the safe design and construction of machinery.

This comprehensive book explains the provision, both law and practice, of equipment and home adaptations to assist older or disabled people in daily living. Characterised by ill-defined statutory reponsibilities and terminology, and an under-developed consumer retail market, the system of provision has long been recognised as chaotic and confusing for professionals and public alike. This is despite the fact that equipment and adaptations are meant to be a central plank of community care. Necessarily wide-ranging but maintaining its focus, the book aims critically to describe the system and thereby promote better practice. By exploring boundaries and breaking points, it will assist people to understand the law when things go wrong - from negligence to judicial review, and from contract to product safety legislation. The range of items covered is great, from alarms to artificial limbs, baths to bedrooms, chopping boards to crutches, electronic toothbrushes to environmental controls, hearing aids to hoists, incontinence pads to ironing equipment, rails to ramps, speech aids to stairlifts, and walking frames to wheelchairs.

This important new book presents the background to the modern programme of European Community initiatives, tracing the origins of a European policy on occupational health and safety, and looking at the progressively expanding ambitions of Commission Action Programmes in this field.

Lack of knowledge about, and noncompliance with, international standards can result in loss of sales and partnership opportunities as well as possible legal action. The International Environmental Standards Handbook provides the necessary historical background to understand the current status of international environmental standards. It contains copies of available treaties and provides coverage of laws and standards. The book offers strategies for designing and implementing environmental systems that will be internationally accepted. It includes a list of information sources and a directory of international environmental organizations.