Share

A new way to ‘Keep Health and Safety Alive’

An innovative new collaboration has begun in Aberdeen that could change the way we think about Health and Safety forever.

A group of students from RGU have been partnered with marketing, design and advertising agencies from around the city, tasked with finding a new way of “Keeping Health and Safety Alive”.

The campaign has been facilitated by Aberdeen Airport, but has the potential to impact every business and leisure sector with every level of interest in Health and Safety.

The brief for the students is to create a campaign around how to keep the messages of H&S fresh and relevant. It is not about reminding people to report spills or hold handrails as important as that may be; it is more about finding a new way of engaging people, in an attempt to maintain a positive safety culture.

Derek Provan is the Airport MD. He said “Health and Safety often gets a bad press. It regularly becomes the butt of jokes, when in fact is quite literally a life or death issue. I am delighted that we can be at the forefront of a campaign like this, and I sincerely hope that the results can change the way everyone thinks about Health and Safety”.

Rita Marcella is the Dean of RGU Business School. She said: “This is a wonderful project for our Communications and PR students to work on as it will test their capacity to design and deliver a very real and meaningful message.”

Neil Urquhart is the Creative Director at tbp!, one of the agencies mentoring the students. He said: “For over a decade, we've been developing sector-leading expertise in HSE communications for the offshore oil and gas industry. We're now applying this expertise to help overcome entrenched attitudes to safety within some of the largest companies across the globe. So we're very excited to share this experience with the students and help them to develop their own ideas about how we can improve public attitudes to safety. It's all about finding creative, engaging and high impact ways to change perceptions. And while that's not an easy task – it should be fun!"

The campaign has been adopted as a module by RGU, and as such students have until May 2012 to develop their campaign. Thereafter a panel of judges will select the winning campaign which will be promoted across the city and ‘shire in summer ’12.

The judging panel is made up of Airport MD Derek Provan, Airport Head of Health, Safety and Compliance Steven Law, Nina Schofield the HSSE Director with AMEC, Wood Group PSN CEO Bob Keiller, and the General Manager of Air Traffic providers NATS in Aberdeen John Mayhew.

192 views