Demarcation — Where Your Job Ends And Someone Else's Begins

I first learned about demarcation at school during Business Studies during an overview of trade unions, their history and their practices. It means determining the boundaries of your job description and scope of works. It's easy enough to work out where those boundaries are most of the time, but what happens when it's not?

Some incidents that came up at one of the sites I manage brought this into focus and all of them involve dealing with noxious substances.

Snot my job

A cleaner was wiping the desks at the end of the day, and... well... someone had sneezed and left a nugget of purest green behind. When she wiped the desk it left a slimy trail across the desk. Disgusted and outraged, she gathered up the evidence in her cloth and took it to the manager to show her the following day, saying, "I'm not touching surfaces with this kind of thing on them."

Scat snap

A few weeks before, someone had smeared faeces on the door frame of a toilet cubicle. Here's the pic, it definitely happened. I received a request to get a specialist hygiene company in to clean it up, which I did. Later on, while discussing the job with the site manager we had a bit of a laugh over it. I mean, who does such a thing? Are they marking their territory or something? I suggested setting up a fire hydrant and setting up a camera nearby—whoever is caught peeing on it is probably the perpetrator. Jokes aside, it was a smear on a door frame. Why get specialists in at a cost of almost £200?

Birdy boo boo

One day, a member of staff found a dead pigeon on the roof by the condenser units. I was asked to send a PO to Pest Control, which I duly did. If I hadn't known better, I'd have asked why they didn't just get a shovel and a plastic bag and sort it out themselves. After all, it was just a pile of dessicated bones and feathers half stuck to the roof by its own dried-out decompositional goo.

Health and safety

In the safety-first environment we work in the possibility of exposure to communicable diseases should always be taken into consideration. At no point should we ever touch human effluent or dead creatures with our bare hands.

Human wastes

Offensive/hygiene wastes are the product of a population which is not known to be infectious. The waste can also be offensive in appearance and smell. When handled, there is a residual health risk, which should be assessed, and appropriate precautions should be implemented. However, provided the waste is appropriately wrapped, properly handled and free from excess liquid, the risk of ill health is considered to be low. - Health and Safety Executive, Managing offensive/hygiene waste safely

Nothing to panic about, says the Health and Safety Executive, just take reasonable precautions, wear gloves, etc. But that's for the non-infectious stuff. I'm not saying you might find yourself working with someone who has [$boogeyman disease of the day] but when it's considered to be wise to get inoculated against Hepatitis A and B if you work in waste management, maybe we shouldn't laugh at the disgusted cleaner who doesn't want to clean phlegm off a desk and tell her to shut up and get on with her job.

Animal carcass disposal

A brief look at the regulations for disposal of dead animals should be sufficient to warn the smart people away from sorting it out themselves. Oakland Site Investigations has made a generic Risk Assessment and Method Statement available online for our perusal with regard to disposal of dead animals. It's on pages 8 and 15:

Potential diseases include Leptospira interrogans (Weil’s disease), Psittacosis, Histoplasmosis, and  many others besides.

If carcasses and waste must be removed then damp down the items to suppress airborne particulates and use suitable PPE, i.e. heavy  rubber  gauntlet style  gloves and disposable overalls, and vapour masks with FFP3 protection filters.

Those are sufficient grounds to stop sniggering as this comes to mind:

Okay, it came to my mind.

Health and Safety at work is not an option

Look again at that list of diseases. They're not the only ones. It's the same with human waste products whether they are from people with terrifying diseases or who only have one of those 'orrible lurgies that are floating around at the moment. It is a big deal and honestly, the less we are exposed to the risks of dealing with biological waste, the better. This is why we get the subcontractors in: they have the equipment, the training and the knowledge of what to do with this stuff once they've bagged it up.

Should we get a subbie in to wipe up snot? No, wear gloves while cleaning and disinfecting the desk. Spray the area with disinfectant, dispose of the cloth appropriately and carry on. If our cleaners aren't being trained in how to deal with waste effectively, they need to be.

What about faecal matter and dead animals? That's when we get the subbies in. Health and safety at work is not an option, it's the law, and it's there for a reason: compliance protects us all.