SLIPS, TRIPS & FALLS
COMMON SENSE DESIGN
Here, nora systems provides a guide to designing and maintaining safe resilient flooring in public buildings along with recommended best practice.
Preventing slips needs to be done in a holistic, common sense way. This starts with addressing issues at source, with key considerations including layouts, pedestrian flows, grab rails, sources of lighting, risk of contamination, footwear and effective use of on-site professional cleaning resources.
Smooth resilient floors can be easier to clean and maintain than floor surfaces with a rougher surface texture and exceed the required slip resistance standard when uncontaminated. These characteristics make them a good choice for many clean and dry public settings. They can be used without limitation as long as occasional spillages are dealt with appropriately and promptly.
GETTING THE SPECIFICATION RIGHT The majority of floors in everyday conditions are dry most of the time. High-quality smooth or moderately textured floors which offer low slip risk are a good choice for these areas. Floors with increased surface roughness affect cleaning as they take extra time and/or effort to remove dirt from the floor. They also hold more cleaning solution even after the excess has been removed, which means residual dirt deposits can remain even after the water evaporates. This can only be prevented by additional cleaning to remove the solution completely and leave the floor dry. A build-up of dirt or cleaning solution over time increases the risk of slipping as well as cleaning costs which mount up over the lifetime of the floor.
When specifying flooring, it is therefore sensible to choose the most practical and easy-to-maintain surface finish where housekeeping and cleaning regimes deal adequately with occasional spills.
When you consider that the lifecycle cost of any floor sees 10% of the total cost go to investment in the flooring
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with the remaining 90% attributed to cleaning and maintenance, choosing an inappropriate material can significantly increase overall costs.
With this in mind, selecting material that does not require stripping and re-coating, or flooring that does not need detergent for routine cleaning, can prove extremely cost effective in the long term.
When specifying flooring, be careful not to over specify where housekeeping and cleaning regimes deal adequately with occasional spills. Specifying rough surfaces in areas that are predominantly clean and dry can add significant costs in terms of time, money and effort.
GOOD DESIGN, ROBUST MAINTENANCE To minimise slips and create safe places, design and good practice are needed in equal measure.
The HSE information sheet on cleaning states that “people rarely slip on a clean dry floor.” So where floors are going to be foreseeably contaminated due to the nature of the activity and it is not reasonably practicable to keep them dry, a floor should be provided which offers slip resistance of 36+ PTV (Pendulum Test Value) or more in the contaminated state. However, for every ay areas that are dry and where occasional spillages are dealt with appropriately and effectively, nora smooth resilient flooring with slip resistance of 36+ PTV and over provides the same level of protection when dry.
UNDERSTANDING SLIP RISK IN
CONTAMINATED AREAS Contamination of flooring is the cause of most slips. Where a floor is likely to be subject to frequent contamination, people should still be able to walk on it without the risk of slipping. The slip resistance must be tested under the
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