How long is reasonable for an employer to take to do a risk assessment after an employee notifies them of pregnancy?

[spilttheteaagain]

I gave my boss notice in writing that I am pregnant almost two weeks ago. (Verbally told them a week earlier). I put in the letter a request that a Risk Assessment was carried out immediately to establish if any changes to my job were required.

Occupational Health sent the forms to me, I gave them to my boss (same day as the pregnancy letter). He has done nothing yet and says he is too busy!

I am worried because I have a lot of manual handling and chemical exposure in my job. He is shortly off on annual leave for nearly two weeks.

What can I do to hurry this along, and how long is normal for an employer to take?

I have actually read a lot of the work manual handling assessments and fear he may be dragging his heels because half of them say "pregnant employees must not do this" and he doesn't want the hassle of doing it himself/re-jigging the work.

I suspect the legislation says a "reasonable amount of time".

Ask occupational health and they'll get the ball rolling.

If I were you I'd take control and suggest that you do it yourself with advice, where needed, from your nominated health and safety person and Occupational Health.

Your manager probably has no idea how to do it. Just ask him if you can book some time in his diary to go through it together.

I had problems as my manager basically had no idea what to do (when I told her i needed a RA she was quite surprised ).

I also do lots of manual handling as I'm a therapist and I had to keep prodding my supervisor to sit down with me to do it, and at the same time cherry pick my clients so I could minimise the man handling involved day to day.

Evewntually my supervisor did an assessment with me and one of the issues that came up was my workstation as I had backache. She "assessed" me and recommended X Y & Z. Then the back care coordinator came out and assessed me and made completely different recommendations. So beware of being "fobbed off".

Agree with the last poster, take control yourself and contact Occ Health. Also if there are aspects of your job that you feel you are no longer safe to do I wouldn't wait for an assessment to confirm it. YOU know your body and certainly shouldn;t take any risks just because the powers-that-be are being rubbish.

I would say by now if you are working with chemicals/manual lifting. If you are concerned that you could be doing things that are potentially hazardous, I would stop doing those things and put it in writing that until you have the risk assessment done.

Do you have a health and safety officer, or anyone else you can go to do to it?

My boss did not do it til i was 17 weeks despite me notifying her at 5 weeks, so i refused to do certain roles til she 'got around to it' and once i took that stance it happened quite quickly. I put it all in writing to cover myself. For example, I knew I was getting v tired v quickly due to constant vomiting in the morning so I came in later, and recorded it. OH in the end made that part of my return to work conditions after a period of absence.

Thanks for your advice.

Occ Health aren't much use to be honest, as the lady who usually is the Occ Health nurse is on a 9 month secondment and her replacement is a bit knaff. She told me "We don't see pregnant women. Line managers deal with them." Though the line managers don't have a clue what to do....

So I have done a mixture of what you all suggested.

I spent an hour this morning finding and printing all the relevant manual handling assessments, highlighting the bits aboout pg workers, printed the "How to do a RA" guide and the blank template for the pregnancy one, and made a series of notes on aspects of my job I am concerned about.

I then caught my boss and asked what progress was being made on the RA. He explained that he isn't the designated risk assessor for our dept (so hasn't done anything at all!!), looked at the info I had found and said he will get in touch with the health and safety person.

So I will give him a day, and later tomorrow will ask what happened when he spoke to them... going for continual nagging/checking up!

Pavlov I like your approach. Appalling that it took them 12 weeks though!

You could also ask your gp. I told my manager at 5 weeks and we discussed what i should and shouldn't do, I then clarified this with my gp at 7 wks- he told me about chemicals etc (we use herbicides) HR did a formal RA for me at 14 weeks, after my line manager informed them of my pg at 12 weeks, as I waited until I'd had the scan before going to HR, but I was satisifed that I'd already eliminated all the hazards with my gp and line manager before the RA was done. Alot of my HR RA said it was down to me as to what I felt comfortable doing with regard to manual handling etc. which I'm very happy with.

To be honest - as much as my job is not as risky as some - I never got a single RA!!!

LittleB I think that's basically what's going to happen. I've got a meeting tomorrow to discuss the RA and job in general and we've been advised that a lot of it will be my call.