HEALTH, SAFETY & WELLBEING Helmets undergo testing at the Mips test centre in Sweden
HARD HATS ANDHAZARDS
Chris Tidy, Product & Training Specialist at Mips and Founder of Hard Hat Awareness Week, analyses the risks around head injuries in construction.
We’ve all seen the headlines about head injuries in sports: rugby, football and boxing, leading to potentially severe cases, long-term issues and degenerative brain conditions caused by multiple head impacts, known as sub-concussions. Many of us face the risk of head injury at work, too. Despite the widespread and mostly mandatory use of hard hats, construction and industrial workers are still at risk for severe head injuries, including concussions. They can suffer concussions from the impact force of a slip, trip or fall and falling objects.
Whether the head impacts the ground after a slip, trip or fall, or if a falling object hits the head, it is likely to be an angled impact, which could introduce a rotational motion to the head. Conventional hard hats protect against injuries such as skull fractures but are often not designed to address rotational motion.
We need to understand more about the different levels of protection that hard hats provide. Although we see high compliance and usage, employers and end-users often default to the lowest-cost solution when procuring safety helmets, as long as it meets the standard. The standard is only the minimum level required. To prevent head injuries onsite, we must first understand the risk. This involves
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educating the supply chain and changing the whole industry perspective. There are a lot of accident records and statistics available online; however, interpreting these is key to understanding and evaluating the risk.
We must continue pushing for better, more detailed accident reporting and statistics to take steps to protect people and ensure we focus on the areas that can have the most significant impact on wearer safety, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI) and rotational injury. The most common type of TBI is a concussion, which accounts for up to 75% of all TBI cases. These injuries are far more common than you think; 50% of TBIs go undiagnosed or detected, while 90% of diagnosed TBIs do not involve a loss of consciousness.
Many of us have seen EN397 safety helmet shock tests where a linear force is directed onto a safety helmet from height, and in most cases, the hard hat remains intact. This test is a sobering reminder of the importance of wearing head protection and demonstrates that these safety helmets are relatively good at absorbing linear impacts. The problem is that most traumatic brain injuries are not caused by a linear impact to the crown of the safety helmet. Research shows that you are more likely to
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