Slips and trips are the most common cause of major injury suffered by employees in the workplace in the UK. It’s as simple as that. In the year 2010-11, according to Health and Safety Executive (HSE) data, a slip or trip injury at work was suffered by 210 in every 100,000 of us. That amounts to a lot of bruises, cuts, sprains, strains, fractures, concussion, spinal injuries, cancelled personal plans, enforced immobility, loss of wages and tragically in the year in question, two avoidable deaths.
True, the number of major slip and trip injuries are down by just over 5000 from 2007-08 levels, which is a cause for rejoicing, but that still meant that nearly 9000 workers suffered major avoidable injury due to a slip or trip in 2010-11 and staggering 21,128 employees suffered injuries sufficiently severe to require three or more days away from work. Most rational people would consider this rate of injury totally unacceptable in what is supposedly, according to national media, an obsessively health and safety conscious country.
Comparative to the size and turnover of most businesses, it is neither an onerous or overly expensive task to identify and then remove or ameliorate the hazards that cause slip inflicted injuries in the workplace. However, nearly a million working days lost due to slips and trips injuries in the last year alone in the UK appear to demonstrate, at the cost of thousands of workers sometimes agonising and severe injuries, that some employers are not willing to confront the issues involved in an effective way. This might be due to unaddressed fundamental shortcomings in their workplace health and safety system, or a quite frankly negligent or careless attitude to discharging their legal duty of care to their employees.
HSE data reveals that the weather might affect the number of slip and trip inflicted injuries with 54% occurring over the autumn and winter period compared to 46% during the spring and summer. The sector with the worst record of major slip and trip injuries is the Transportation and Storage industries (3,615 slip and trip injuries in 2010-11), a total that might have been contributed to by failures to deal adequately with weather-related slip hazards. Unfortunately the Human Health and Social Care and Manufacturing sectors were not very far behind Transportation and Storage in the number of major slip and trip injuries reported.
Slip and trip injuries in the workplace is a problem which seems to be reducing in size at a painfully slow rate – with some recalcitrant employers seemingly content to accept the productivity loss due to absent injured employees or defend claims for workplace injury compensation or be prosecuted by the HSE. Extraordinary, unacceptable, but sadly true.
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