HEALTH & SAFETY
MANAGING RISK: THE ROLE OF SIGNS IN A SAFE WORKING ENVIRONMENT
Industrial factories can present a risk to the safety of employees, suppliers, and visitors alike, and it is the responsibility of management to take every step necessary to mitigate that risk. Here, Danny Adamson, Managing Director at Stocksigns explains the key role that effective signage solutions can play in making the factory environment as safe as possible.
he Office for National Statistics (ONS) defines manufacturing as “the physical or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.” It then lists—in extraordinary detail—the different activities that sit beneath this enormous umbrella. As well as the products you might expect to see here—food and drink, pharmaceuticals, clothing, motor vehicles, furniture, computer products—you will also come across some specific categories including sandwiches, beekeeping machinery and pencil sharpeners. Manufacturing also covers certain repair and maintenance activities, which leads to the wonderful juxtaposition of finding fishing nets and pinball machines listed immediately after military fighting vehicles.
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This preamble illustrates the diversity of activities that take place across the UK’s manufacturing industry, and the huge differences in the types of ‘factory’ environments in which the sector’s estimated 2.5 million employees work. Whether it is an artisan bakery, a family-owned industrial engineering SME or a sparkling, state-of-the-art production facility managed almost entirely by robotics, every one of them has to comply with essentially the same occupational health and safety
30 FEBRUARY 2022 | FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS legislation.
And there’s good reason for this. Despite continuing improvements to health and safety in the workplace, figures released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in 2020 showed that some 66,000 people sustain work- related injuries every year across the manufacturing sector, with around a quarter of these resulting in seven or more days of absence from work. The cost to industry was an estimated £658 million in 2018/19. The cost in human lives is an average of 20 a year. Look at it in terms of the number of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers, and this figure is over 50% higher than that of the overall industrial average. While things are improving—fatality rates are 75% lower than they were 40 years ago—this is of little consolation to those families, friends and co-workers affected. So, what are the main causes of injury? According to the same report, the most common causes of non-fatal injuries by accident are: *
* A slip, trip or fall *
* Lifting/carrying *
object *
* Being struck by moving or falling
* Contact with machinery In terms of fatal injuries, the primary causes are falling from a height, contact
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