Unfortunately, there are still a high percentage of employers who don't take safety seriously enough and are yet to embrace and appreciate the importance of occupational safety.
There is also by some a belief that providing a safe working environment is too expensive, they cannot justify the cost and the implementation of a safety culture would be a liability.
Those companies who don’t take safety seriously are often cutting corners, gambling with their employees' lives and taking a risk with the consequences.
The benefits of a safe working environment:
The benefits of a good safety culture far outweigh the consequences of not having any safety culture.
A life should never be at risk due to cutting corners, the impact of lost production or the effect on the bottom line. It is an employer’s responsibility to provide a safe work environment for their employees and to ensure everyone leaves for home safely each and every day.
Although primary health and safety responsibility remains with employers; employees have a responsibility for their own health, safety and well-being as well as ensuring they don’t put their colleagues at risk.
Employees should report any hazards discovered in the workplace, report any injuries suffered as a result of carrying out their work, co-operate with their employer to ensure they receive correct and appropriate training and regularly check and follow health and safety policies.
Effective health and safety systems should be delivered through good leadership, management tasks, integration with business processes and compliance.
The statistics speak for themselves:
Shockingly statistics indicate one worker in the UK is killed every six weeks as a result of accidents involving fork lift trucks alone and many more suffer very serious injuries.
Employers have a duty under section 17 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 to ensure that pedestrians and vehicles can circulate in a safe manner. Therefore employers should assess the working environment and take steps to try to segregate vehicles and pedestrians.
An incident at a UK company occurred where a worker stepped out into an aisle and another worker, who was driving a reach truck, ran over his foot causing broken bones and bruising.
The injured worker was not wearing safety boots with steel toe caps when the incident happened.
An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive into the incident found that workplace transport was not organised to ensure pedestrians and vehicles can circulate safely as they both operated in the same areas without segregation.
Better organisation of the workplace transport within the warehouse would have prevented this incident from happening.
The company pleaded guilty to breaching Regulations 17(1) of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, and Regulation 3(1) of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 and was fined £50,000 and ordered to pay costs of £10,406.
Introducing ZoneSafe:
ZoneSafe is a safety solution designed to detect personnel around vehicles and high-risk areas.
Its proximity warning systems can significantly reduce the risk of accidents between people and vehicles such as forklifts or any vehicle working in close proximity to pedestrian workers.
By creating awareness to both the driver and the pedestrian worker through the use of audible-visual alarms, ZoneSafe proximity warning systems help to improve safety around workplace transport and reduce the risk of an accidental collision.
The system has the ability to log near miss occurrence data, which can be viewed using a cloud-based management information system. The data can be viewed and shared with site managers and supervisors to help make efficient and effective decisions relating to on-site safety.
For more information please visit our website or to book a free demonstration call us on 01202 868000.