HEALTH & SAFETY
Dealing with emergencies when working at height
Ashley Morpeth, an Authorising Engineer at ETA Projects, and an experienced health and safety professional with particular expertise in the field, discusses some of the key guidance on formulating emergency and rescue plans for working at height, including rooftop working.
Any person working on a roof that they have had to gain access to via an external fixed ladder, a scaffold, a portable ladder, a MEWP (mobile elevating work platform), or any other similar means of access equipment, is deemed to be ‘working at height’ under The Work at Height Regulations 2005.
When it comes to estates management, a large amount of PPM, reactive, or installation work occurs on rooftops across the country on a daily basis, and healthcare estates are no different. HVAC systems, lift motor rooms, mobile phone antenna sites, photovoltaic systems, fume extracts, lightning protection systems, water storage tanks, and many other types of systems and equipment, are located on the roofs of our healthcare buildings. So, the question is, are the people who
are doing this work, working at height? ‘Working at Height’ is defined in The Work at Height Regulations 2005 (WaHR 2005) as any work undertaken in any place above, at, or below, ground level, from which, if measures were not taken, a person could fall a distance liable to cause injury. This includes gaining access to or egress from such a place of work except by means of a staircase in a permanent workplace. What this means is that any person who is working on a roof that they have had to
46 Health Estate Journal August 2024
When it comes to estates management, a large amount of PPM, reactive, or installation work, occurs on rooftops across the country on a daily basis.
gain access to via an external fixed ladder, a scaffold, a portable ladder, a MEWP (mobile elevating work platform), or any other similar means of access equipment, is indeed working at height. This in turn means that the requirements of the WaHR 2005 must be followed in full.
Properly planned and adequately supervised Regulation 4, ‘Organisation and planning’, states that every employer shall ensure that all work at height is properly planned, appropriately supervised, and carried out in a manner which is as safe as is reasonably practicable. Essentially this means that a full Safe System of Work is required, and the use of the word ‘shall’ also implies that this is an absolute requirement. (If a requirement in a regulation is ‘absolute’, then the requirement must be met regardless of the cost, time, or effort incurred in doing so. In other words, it is not optional; it is mandatory). This point is important,
as there have been multiple Health and Safety Executive notices and fines issued, and even prosecutions in the past, specifically for organisations working at height without written Safe Systems of Work. Regulation 4 then goes on to say that
reference to proper planning of work includes planning for emergencies and rescue. It is this point I wish to focus on further. Unfortunately, I have seen so often in the past that organisations will either not have an Emergency and Rescue Plan for Work at height at all, or – on the rare occasion that they do – it is normally only one or two lines to the effect that ‘in an emergency we will phone 999’. It is important to note that reliance on the emergency services alone will not be sufficient to comply with the regulations (as stated in the 2020 HSE document HSG33 – Health and safety in roof work). So, now we have established what
working at height is, and what the requirements of the regulations are, what
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