Have we cured “ Working At Height ”?

working at height

Working At Height by Paul Lacey

Looking at the HSE stats, deaths related with work at heights fell in the 2008/9 year by 33% over an average of the previous three years so I guess as safety professionals we can all give ourselves a pat on the back? Since the inception of the Working at Height Regulations 2005 this shows a marked improvement does it not?

Well, as with all statistics these can be read with a certain cynicism, but a reduction from 55 in 2007/8 to 35 the following year is a vast improvement. However, more pessimistic are the Major Accident statistics, an increase of 42% to 4654 and the 3+ day injury rate, a 78% increase to 7065.

Improvements and the adoption of safety equipment such as fall arrests, fall prevention and safe landing have no doubt started to make an impact in the number of deaths, but they also have the potential to bring about hazards of their own such as suspension trauma, strains and sprains.

Method Statements and Risk Assessments that I have seen have included fall prevention and fall mitigation, but rarely do I see one that includes a rescue plan should something happen at height (or depth), a rescue plan should the fall arrest equipment be used or how the organisation is going to review their working practices against their plan.

Reading further into the HSE supplied figures is even more worrying. The employer survey (2007) states no more than 16% use safety equipment to control the risks, no more than 31% use risk assessment to control the risks and 38% of employers think they can do no more to control the risks. Try telling that to the 12289 people injured in 2008/9?

Contrast this with the workers survey where under half of people working at height have received training in the risks, and nearly 60% of those interviewed state their supervisors hadn’t checked the working practices with regards to them working at height in the previous year.

It would be interesting to see if the majority of the accidents happened within these companies but I’m afraid you can’t glean that from the statistics supplied. It obviously begs the questions though of how the method statements and risk assessments were specific to the work being undertaken if the supervisors hadn’t been to see the work or performed an audit or review the working practices against these.

Yes we should be grateful that there have been fewer deaths but we should be increasingly alert to the potentials for work at height incidents happening in the first place. Stricter working at height legislation has helped, I’m sure, but application of safe working practice to well trained and motivated individuals with more interaction with managers and supervisors will improve things further.

When we have helped reduce fall from height deaths, better still eliminated them and made vast improvements to the serious injuries caused from these accidents, we may quietly congratulate ourselves.