New edition of the Technical Guide on occupational health and safety signage

The INSST has just published the second edition of theTechnical guide on safety and health signage at work, a technical document that develops Royal Decree 485/1997, of April 14, on minimum provisions on safety and health signage at work.

This edition incorporates the regulatory changes and technical advances produced since 2009, among which the modifications of article 1 and annexes III and VII stand out as a result of the publication of Royal Decree 598/2015.

The guide is structured in three large blocks and the first of them reflects the company's obligations in relation to health and safety signage, and special attention is paid to specifying, clarifying and concretizing the generality of the title and its field of application, establishing a technical criterion to determine where signs should be posted, regardless of the legal nature of the term workplace.

In the second block, made up of the annexes to the RD, the requirements and conditions that the signage used in workplaces must meet are clarified depending on the type of sign in question.

In the last block, made up of two appendices, aspects considered excessively broad to be included in the corresponding section or for which a more in-depth technical development is necessary are developed. The first appendix, completely new, arises as a result of the publication of the non-binding Guidelines relating to Directive 92/58/EEC, while the second includes aspects related to the signaling of dangerous goods transport units.