5 Ways to Ensure Your Organisation Avoids Costly Accidents at Work

Within your working environment it is important that your staff and members of the public are safe. Here are 5 things that all organisations should think about when it comes to avoiding accidents that can result in costly fines.

1. Spot Potential Hazards

When assessing your working environment for health and safety hazards it is important to have a specialist present. Site surveys are a great way to ensure that your organisation has spotted potential risks, allowing you to be proactive when it comes to avoiding costly accidents.

2. Clearly demarcate potential hazards

As the most common cause of major injuries at work, slips and trips can not only be traumatic for your employees but can also be very costly to your business – costing employers £512 million per year in lost production and other costs. . Temporary hazards such as areas being cleaned or maintained can be an unexpected danger for your employees if additional attention isn’t drawn to them and they aren’t properly demarcated.

3. Avoid Falls From Height

“Falls from height remain the most common cause of workplace fatality. In a single year there were 35 fatalities, 4654 major injuries and a further 7065 injuries that caused the injured person to be off work for over 3 days or more, due to a fall from height.” HSE

As we all know failing to prevent falls from height can have fatal consequences. If you work within a vehicle maintenance area, open pits have a serious potential to be very dangerous if not clearly marked. The successful coach provider, Stagecoach recognised that its depot vehicle-inspection pits – which are up to 21 metres long, 1.5m wise and almost 2m deep – were a hazard that needed to be addressed and consequently deployed a flexible pit protection solution to improve the safety of their working environment.

4. Create Clear People Traffic Routes

Creating clear people traffic routes can not only help your organisation avoid accidents, due to employees or members of the public unknowingly straying from safe areas, it can also help to eliminate confusion and frustration as a result of people being unaware of pedestrian routes throughout your site.

5. Close ‘Out of Access’ Areas

If you have areas that are closed for access, for example where forklifts are in use or a lift is out of service, it is important that your organisation is able to quickly and easily close off these areas at the same time as drawing attention to and giving a warning about the potential hazard.

Tensator offers a wide range of cost effective, high visibility safety barriers that can help your organisation avoid costly accidents at work. Our experienced specialists are available to carry out onsite surveys, allowing us to work with you to create flexible solutions that fit your exacting requirements.

For smaller projects, a selection of our standard products are available to purchase online at http://www.tensabarrierdirect.com/uk. We will be exhibiting at the Safety and Health Expo at stand I73 from tomorrow until Thursday.

When Tensator working closely on a project with Stagecoach they said “Using Tensator’s pit-protection technology is helping ensure our employees are safe, and accidents that might otherwise occur are prevented.”