Robbie Epsom, Anaphylaxis UK Ambassador
I advise on sustainability for a living, and increasingly on AI. But the third thing I talk about is anaphylaxis. I have lived with a life-threatening tree nut allergy for over 35 years, and my son now has one to peanuts and tree nuts too. So, when Anaphylaxis UK asked me to write about “belonging” for the workplace day of Anaphylaxis Awareness Week, I knew where to start.
The moment it clicked was in a French hospital bed following a reaction on a work trip. It was my second reaction while working away, and the question I couldn’t shake was: why? Every company I have worked for managed travel, security and fire risks, but anaphylaxis never appeared in their health and safety policy. Not because nobody cared. It simply wasn’t written down, so nobody owned it.
Professional life has taught me that organisations do what their policies say. Goodwill doesn’t survive a reorganisation, but a page in the health and safety policy does. The gap wasn’t a lack of kindness. It was a missing page.
So, I drafted one. Anaphylaxis UK took it through legal review, and Dr Helen Evans-Howells conducted the medical review. It now exists as a template workplace anaphylaxis policy, sitting alongside the charity’s AllergyWise for Workplaces training. It covers what nobody thinks about until it matters: what “may contain” actually means, hot desks, office catering, business travel, and the fact that under the Human Medicines Regulations any colleague can give adrenaline in an emergency without fear of repercussions.
Almost every moment of our lives outside the front door is managed by a business: the office, the train, a school or an airline that gets us there, the airport, the hotel, the restaurant. That is also where most serious reactions happen, because at home people can manage the risk themselves. Getting an anaphylaxis policy into workplaces protects both employees and the public. It creates a systematic way to record and learn from mistakes.
Why does a policy matter to belonging? Belonging is fragile when those around you don’t understand the basics,. Allergy is a specialism, even within medicine. A few years ago, after two adrenaline auto-injectors and more adrenaline in the ambulance, the senior doctor on shift in A&E looked at my results and wondered aloud whether it might have been anxiety. If anaphylaxis can be misread in A&E, it’s no wonder restaurants struggle with “may contain”, leaving my son confused as to why the waiter can’t guarantee a dish is safe.
Policy and awareness are just the beginning. Once a workplace has a framework, it begins to understand what is actually possible for allergy management. I know this firsthand. Writing and speaking about this policy introduced me to Dr Helen. Despite decades inside the allergy community, immunotherapy had never been on my radar. Over many appointments with excellent specialists, the question of whether I was allergic to every nut had simply never come up. Dr Helen approached my allergies with medically supervised food challenges. Within a month, cashew and pistachio – nuts I had avoided for 35 years – were off my list.
In November my son and I both start sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) for the nuts that remain, and after years of fear, doing this together has changed our family’s outlook. Alongside that sit the basics that any workplace or family can act on: asthma properly controlled, because uncontrolled asthma is one of the biggest risk factors for a serious reaction, and needle-free adrenaline (EURneffy). None of this is a cure. It is risk management, and it starts with knowing the options exist.
If you run a business, that is where you come in. Contact Anaphylaxis UK, book workplace training for your workplace, and integrate the policy template. If you are an employee with an allergy, use this week to start that conversation. Belonging at work starts with a page in the policy.
#SenseOfBelonging #WearItBright