SLIPS, TRIPS & FALLS REDUCE YOUR SLIP RISK
Christian Harris, a slipologist who hosts the Safety & Risk Success Podcast and the fortnightly Safety Roundtable, says it is possible to quantifiably reduce your risk of slipping by 50,000 times.
Slips are the biggest cause of accident (30%), injury (300,000 A&E visits) and insurance claim (£1.5bn+) each year.
It often feels so frustrating, doesn’t it: you have policies and procedures in place, you’re using yellow signs, spillage control and entrance matting – all the basics are there, but people just keep on slipping and getting hurt. Are slips just inevitable?
I’m pleased to say that the answer is a firm no. Slips are not inevitable. In fact, it’s possible to quantifiably reduce your slip risk by 50,000 times.
SLIP SAFETY IS A SCIENCE To discover how, you first need to understand that slip risk can be quantified.
The pendulum slip test is the HSE- and court-approved method of measuring slip resistance of floors. It mimics the way your heel hits the floor when you walk: it’s at this exact split second that a slip can happen.
The test gives you a number, a Pendulum Test Value (PTV). The higher the number, the higher the slip resistance. There are three categories of slip potential: a score of 0-24 gives a high slip potential; 25-35 moderate slip potential; and 36+ low slip potential.
But there’s more: HSE and BRE correlated PTV with accident risk:
PTV 20 24 27 29 34 36
Accident risk 1 in 2
1 in 20 1 in 200
1 in 10,000 1 in 100,000 1 in 1,000,000
However, don’t confuse dry slip risk with wet slip risk. Almost any floor will achieve a PTV of 36+ when clean and dry; but people slip in wet or contaminated conditions.
USE THE DATA TO YOUR ADVANTAGE So how can you reduce your slip risk by 50,000X? Quite simply: use the maths.
• Find a floor that has a PTV of 20 and improve the PTV to 34; or
• Find a floor that has a PTV of 24 and improve the PTV to 36.
Now, I’m being a little facetious in saying ‘simply’ as achieving the improvement needs knowledge and skill. But without doing the pendulum slips test, of course, you can only ever be guessing. To have the certainty of risk reduction, you need the science; you need to do the testing.
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HOW CAN THE PTV BE IMPROVED? Let’s use data to help with this too. Over the last 12 years, my team and I have slip tested 15,000+ floors. Here’s what we have found:
• Only 20% of floors, across all industries, have low slip potential as we’ve found them. So, four in five floors can be improved.
• Of the 80% of floors that are slippery when wet, half of these can be improved to a low slip potential with more effective cleaning. So, 40% of all floors could be safe, even when wet, with better cleaning.
• The remaining 40% of floors are simply slippery when wet. To make these safe requires an anti-slip treatment.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO, NOW? • Book in a slip test to understand where on the PTV scale you currently stand.
• Take action, based on this, to address areas of risk: • Try improving your cleaning process in-house. •
If that doesn’t work, invite a floorcare slip safety specialist third party to review.
•
If floors are found to have high slip risk when wet even when cleaned effectively, explore an anti- slip treatment.
• Validate the improvements with further slip testing.
• Get an annual slip safety certificate to have confidence of safety and to protect yourself against claims.
https://slipsafety.co.uk www.tomorrowshs.com
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