Health and Safety laws and risk assessments

This information applies to people in the UK only. If you live outside the UK, then more information about epilepsy and employment where you are will be available from your local epilepsy organisation.

The two main laws are the Health and Safety at Work Act (HASAW) and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations. These say that both employer and employee must ensure the safety of themselves and others.

As an employer you will want to make the workplace as safe as possible. When considering the work that a person with epilepsy can do, you have a duty to carry out a risk assessment.

As mentioned earlier, epilepsy affects each person in a different way, but a risk assessment might include asking the person the following questions:

• What type(s) of seizure do you have?
• How often do you have seizures?
• How long do your seizures usually last?
• What usually happens when you have a seizure?
• How long does it usually take you to recover from a seizure?
• What time of day do you usually have seizures?
• Do you get a warning, also known as an ‘aura’, before you have a seizure?

The answers to these questions may help you to decide whether the person with epilepsy could do a particular job in the same way as other employees or whether some ‘reasonable adjustment’ may be needed.

Who does the risk assessments?

Many employers carry out their own risk assessments and advice is also available from the following organisations.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
The HSE provides general information and guidance for employers about work-related health and safety issues. They also offer a free leaflet Five steps to risk assessment , which aims to help employers to do their own risk assessments. This can be downloaded from their website.

Further help and advice on risk assessments

There are many private health and safety consultancies that will visit your workplace and carry out a risk assessment on your behalf. A charge will be made for these services.

Details of health and safety consultancies can be found in phone books and through internet search engines.