FLOOR SAFETY
DON’T SLIP UP!
Wet environments such as shower rooms, bathrooms and toilets offer plenty of challenges when it comes to health and safety. David Cockhead, Altro’s Quality and Compliance Advisor, outlines key considerations to prevent slips in areas where people are often at their most vulnerable.
Most buildings have wet environments that will be used by a wide variety of people who can be at risk of slipping, and the law says they need to be protected.
The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 requires employers to ensure the health and safety of all employees and anyone affected by their work, so far as is reasonably practicable, which means balancing the level of risk against the measures needed to control the risk in terms of money, time or trouble. This includes taking steps to control slip and trip risks. The HSE says: “The floors specified for barefoot areas should have good slip resistance in wet conditions for both shod and barefoot users.”
Whilst the use of safety flooring in wet environments is now commonplace, many people are unaware that not all
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products are up to the demands of these challenging areas.
WHERE TO START... The first step in ensuring you specify the right flooring, is to understand how manufacturers test and measure slip-resistance. Across the world safety flooring is tested in various ways. The standard Pendulum Test (BS 7976) is often used in the UK. The ‘pendulum’ is a dummy heel that is swung over a set area of flooring in a controlled manner to simulate slipping on a wet floor. The slipperiness of the flooring has a direct and measurable effect on the pendulum value. Flooring that achieves a wet result of Pendulum Test Value ≥36 has a low slip potential, and translates to a 1 in a million chance of slipping.
The Ramp Test is also widely used. R9-R13 values are based on angle
measurements of a motor oil-covered ramp that an operator walks on. The angle at which the operator slips forms the R value. Because the most common contaminant on floors is
Wet environments flooring checklist:
• Look for specialist flooring for wet environments that can protect users from slips, even with a range of contaminants
• Choose flooring suitable both for the likely contaminants and the type of traffic that will use it, ie, shoes and/or barefeet
• Opt for safety flooring that delivers lifetime slip resistance with a one in a million chance of a slip (PTV ≥36).
• Choose flooring that’s easy to clean to avoid hazardous levels of dirt or contaminant build-up
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