Opinion Warehouse Safety
Safety culture best for business
James Clark, secretary-general of the British Industrial Truck Association (BITA), addresses how to prevent fork lift trucks making headlines for the wrong reasons.
Three separate prosecutions in one sector in one month with health and
“Bad practices, poor supervision or a lack of training can increase the dangers of operating fork lift trucks, which account for one in four workplace transport accidents”
safety fi ndings serves as a stark reminder of the need to identify and adhere to safety best practice in the workplace, while ensuring unsafe practices are eliminated. The triple prosecution in the food sector resulted in fi nes totalling £212,000 for the companies concerned, but more importantly involved the death of one worker and injury to two others, one of whom was critically injured. Two of the cases involved injury resulting from workers falling after being lifted directly or indirectly on forklifts’ prongs, while the fatality – a worker struck by a forklift – occurred in a workplace in which vehicles and pedestrians were not adequately separated.
NEGATIVE PUBLICITY
None of us wants to see fork lift trucks in the headlines as a result of such cases, and no company wants the negative publicity that can result from the reporting of such incidents, so what needs to be done to ensure safer working? Following these cases, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) issued a reminder that bad practices, poor supervision or a lack of training can increase the dangers of operating fork lift trucks, which account for one in four workplace transport accidents – many of which the HSE says
18 March 2014
are ‘entirely preventable.’ Warehouses are among the most hazardous environments in the materials handling sector, and ‘struck by’ incidents – where a pedestrian is hit by a vehicle – are the most common cause of major workplace accidents in the UK. For this reason warehouse managers and operators should prioritise developing and maintaining safe systems of traffi c management based on three core activities: • Physically segregating pedestrian and vehicle areas in the warehouse;
• Training and supervising vehicle operators;
• Raising awareness among all pedestrians, employees and visitors.
Although it isn’t a specifi c legal requirement to segregate pedestrian areas, operators do have an overall obligation for managers to ‘provide a safe working environment.’ I’m sure we are all aware that initial operator training is compulsory for forklift operators, but refresher training is not a legal requirement. This means that there is an onus on employers and employees to be aware of best practice based on their own initiative. At BITA we believe that materials handling stakeholders have a vital role to play in the process – and must be accountable. We
www.shdlogistics.com
have developed publications such as our safety best-practice booklets for operators, as well as guidance notes for employers and managers which include the latest developments in legislation and best practice. As you would expect, the HSE also has an extensive range of information, advice and materials on its website –
www.hse.gov.uk – but there is also an excellent single-source HSE book Warehousing and storage: A guide to health and safety (HSG 76). However, it isn’t just knowing what to do – but deciding how to do it. Many logistics and materials handling companies do build their corporate culture around site safety and security, but unfortunately some of them do not always do what they say. These companies don’t appreciate that safety best practice is not a cost or an encumbrance, but a fundamental investment in the future health of employees and their own bottom line. BITA maintains that it is possible to greatly reduce the likelihood of accidents occurring and that by investing in safety best practice companies can hopefully avoid hearing that accidents were “entirely preventable” in any subsequent court case. ■
www.bita.org.uk
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