Health & Safety Week

17th October 2011 

As in previous years, Le Méridien St Julians Hotel & Spa in Balluta Bay has organised a very successful Health & Safety week, with an array of interesting related activities spread out between the 10th and the 15th of October 2011.

The Health & Safety committee of the hotel, led by Health & Safety Manager Joseph Zammit, has once again come up with great initiatives primarily aimed at offering a safer workplace to the hotel's employees. This series of events is strongly encouraged by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, the mother company of Le Méridien St Julians Hotel & Spa. During the week, talks on various themes were organised: manual food handling, health & safety at the workplace, the importance of recycling waste, etc. Workshops for Le Méridien associates were also put together to present subjects such as food handler's training and HACCP training.

"It was a very rewarding and eventful week" states Joseph Zammit who instigated the full organisation of the week. "We had a great turn-out to most of the events and an even better feed-back! After a couple of years of hard work to get everyone involved, mentalities have changed and we can now witness a true interest from both our staff and our local community".

Yearly mandatory initiatives from Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide were successfully incorporated in the programme, starting with a Table Top exercise, whereas all hotel key managers were presented with an emergency scenario and asked to brainstorm and work as a team to take the most relevant actions in reaction to the given situation.

Since Starwood also strongly encourages its properties to involve the local community, the Security and H&S Department of the hotel has also worked closely with St Julians Council. The Mayor of St Julians Mr. Peter Bonello and his team have indeed shown full support to the hotel's initiatives.

Amongst a very busy schedule of varied initiatives, one of the highlights of the week was certainly the Blood Donation Campaign last Wednesday where both hotel employees and the residents of St Julians were encouraged to donate blood in front of the hotel. On Friday, children from St Julians' primary school were invited for an educational talk by Mrs Gaerty from Green Skips. Last but not least, an event was dedicated, on Saturday, to the elderly community of St Julians with a talk about ‘First Aid and Fire Awareness at home" delivered by an expert in the field.

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