What we do
The practical work of Vibrant Health Advocates – Janus is rooted in direct contact with farming and crofting families across a large and often hard-to-reach geographic area. We operate a rolling calendar of farm visits, attending holdings from Loch Fyne to Ardnamurchan and across to the Inner Hebrides, meeting people in the sheds, fields, and byres where the actual risks of their working lives are present and visible.
We do not ask farmers to come to us — we go to them, because we know that time is the scarcest resource on any working farm, and because the quality of a health-and-safety conversation changes when it happens in context, next to the piece of machinery that has been causing concern or in the field where someone twisted their knee last autumn.
Beyond direct visits, we maintain a substantial presence at agricultural events across Argyll — the Oban mart, local shows, the Royal Highland Show — where informal conversations often turn into the first step toward addressing something a family has been managing quietly for years. Our helpline, staffed during working hours and monitored outside them, handles everything from questions about PPE for chemical application to concerns about a recurring injury that someone isn't sure warrants a GP visit.
We treat every enquiry as an opportunity to give a genuinely useful answer, and we track the topics that come up repeatedly so we can update our resources and programme focus accordingly. The measure of our work is not how many leaflets we distribute but how many people in Argyll's farming community feel more confident, more informed, and less alone in managing the physical demands of their work.
48
farms visited last year alone — from Kintyre to the Inner Hebrides
Each programme is designed around the real constraints of agricultural life — not around what's convenient for us.
We come to you — offering one-to-one health and safety conversations at the farm gate, tailored to the specific work and risks of your holding.
Our outreach workers visit farms and crofts across Argyll throughout the year, working around the agricultural calendar so visits happen at a time that suits the family rather than us. A typical visit covers musculoskeletal risk from the most physically demanding tasks on that holding, chemical handling and protective equipment, machinery and livestock safety, and a frank conversation about when and how to access health services. We follow up every visit with a short written summary of anything discussed, so there is a clear record to return to.
Seasonal half-day health check events held at accessible locations across the peninsula, giving farmers a structured moment to take stock of their occupational health.
Held four times a year at venues including the Argyll and Bute agricultural centre, village halls in Taynuilt and Inveraray, and the community hub on Mull, our Body MOT sessions combine practical health screening with expert-led discussion of the most common occupational health concerns in Scottish agriculture. Participants can have basic musculoskeletal assessments, hearing checks, blood pressure readings, and skin assessments carried out by trained practitioners, with clear referral pathways for anyone whose results warrant follow-up. The sessions are free, take no more than two hours, and have consistently been rated as the single most useful thing we offer.
Plain-language printed and digital resources covering the specific health risks of farming and crofting in the Scottish Highlands, written with and for the people who use them.
We produce a series of topic-specific information packs that cut through the generic occupational health literature to address conditions and risks that are directly relevant to working in Argyll's particular terrain and climate — including organophosphate exposure from sheep dip, the long-term respiratory effects of hay and grain dust, zoonotic disease risks from common Highland livestock, and managing musculoskeletal health during the peak physical demands of lambing and harvest. Packs are updated annually, available in print at the Oban mart and feed merchants across Argyll, and downloadable from our website. They are written in plain English, peer-reviewed by practising farmers before publication, and deliberately short enough to read in a tea break.
A dedicated outreach strand for young farmers, new crofting tenants, and people coming into agricultural work without a family background in the sector.
Taking on a first tenancy or a first employed agricultural role comes with a health-and-safety learning curve that experienced farmers navigate almost unconsciously — but that new entrants have to build from scratch, often under significant financial and emotional pressure. Our New Entrants strand pairs incoming farmers with an outreach worker for a series of visits in their first full agricultural year, covering site-specific risk assessment, equipment safety, and the practicalities of looking after a body that is suddenly doing hard physical work every day. We also run an annual two-day induction workshop in Oban, open to anyone who has taken on a new agricultural holding or position in the previous twelve months.
Numbers don't tell the whole story, but they give a sense of the scale.