As a facilities management company, a fundamental aspect of your duty is managing the health and safety of your clients’ businesses. These duties can extend to managing water treatment compliance, which, if not adequately controlled, can lead to a harmful outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease and other dangerous bacteria. If this is to happen, your company is liable for prosecution, because you failed to protect your clients.  The penalties can be severe – hefty fines in conjunction with lost business, a tarnished reputation and possibly even a jail sentence.

To ensure that this doesn’t happen to you, no less than full legionella compliance must be achieved for your clients – here’s how.

Undertaking training

If monitoring tasks are not carried out correctly and proper control practices are not in place, this may increase the risk of legionella or other infectious agents contaminating the water system. As legionella presents the most serious danger, it is regulated under stringent control measures. Therefore, to remain legionella compliant, the site responsible person and the person nominated to carry out the monitoring tasks must be aware of the nature of the bacteria, the warning signs that it could be growing, the risk factors that can encourage its growth and the control methods required to keep it at bay.

The best way to get this deeper knowledge of understanding is to undertake legionella training. Whilst you may not be carrying out the control methods on your client’s sites yourself, you’ll need to be equipped with the knowledge to oversee that it is being done correctly. This is especially important for when you are hiring a water treatment supplier – if you have the adequate knowledge, you’ll be in a much better position to audit the supplier thoroughly and pick the right one. More specifically, it will give you the power to ensure:

• The supplier is competent and experienced
• They go beyond the basics of what is required of them

Monitoring your clients

Without breaching into Big Brother territory, FM companies must keep a mindful watch over their clients to make sure they are carrying out their duties in controlling water systems’ safety. As discussed above, legionella can grow rapidly in the right conditions, and something like failing to monitor water temperatures to ensure they are not at the optimal temperature for legionella growth can result in an outbreak.

This is where ease of communication between you, your water treatment supplier and your client will come into play. You will need a consistent and straightforward way of checking that clients have up to date water risk assessments and carrying out and recording their legionella control regime.

At Brodex, for example, all our clients are provided free access to an online platform that registers all of the work carried out at a site. It also gives the customer the ability to record their own duties, for example, monthly temperature monitoring or weekly flushing of the water system. If anything is overlooked, it will be flagged up on the system, giving all three parties full visibility into what is happening at a site.

As such, monitoring your clients and ensuring that your staff have a sound and working knowledge of legionella is critical for FM companies. It’ll help you achieve legionella safety and avoid penalties for non-compliance.

If you’re not entirely sure what your and your clients’ legal responsibilities are when it comes to legionella, download our free guide: ‘Legionella compliance and liabilities for FM companies'

References:

https://www.legionellacontrol.org.uk/_data/pdf/lca-legionella-risk-assessment.pdf

https://www.legionellacontrol.org.uk/_data/pdf/09-ca-requirements.pdf

http://www.fmj.co.uk/controlling-legionella-with-modern-training-techniques/