Falls from vehicles cost businesses a huge amount of money. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) says that during 2004/05 the human and economic cost of fall-from-vehicle incidents was £36.5m - 'more than Nigeria's GDP', as one HSE employee puts it. Unsurprisingly, more than 75% of these injuries occur during loading and unloading activities.
But falls from vehicles aren't the injuries that can happen on your or your customers' premises. People being struck by vehicles, goods falling onto
people, and slips and trips and injuries sustained while handling goods all give the HSE cause for concern. Between 2001 and 2006 the cost of all fatalities and injuries in haulage and warehousing alone was between £117.5m and £146m per year.
The HSE warns that injuries are on the increase but says the solution lies in an open exchange of information between every step of the delivery process - from supplier through to carrier and on to the recipient. Most of the actions that can be taken are common sense: cleaning up after yourself or others, checking and monitoring the unloading method used not just by you but also by your customers, making signs explaining hazards available in more than one language, ensuring all employees have suitable footwear, and so on.
Janice Dale, HSE inspector, says: "Agreeing a safe delivery plan means providing safety information on deliveries and collections to other parties in the supply chain as well. A critical question is 'where's the
driver when all this is going on?'. It's your responsibility to talk to other people involved in the supply chain and think about what's provided at other sites."
Rob Shaw, a scientist at the Health and Safety Laboratory, an agency of the HSE, says that during 2004-05 more than a third of all injuries were caused by slips and trips, and 90% of those were fractures. He adds: "Between 2002 and 2003 slips, trips and falls accounted for 10 times more hospital bed days than car accidents. This is slightly skewed by the fact that you are less likely to survive a car accident, but that's a huge number of accidents: 698,336 compared with around 8,000." Dale concludes: "There's nothing [as horrible as] going on to a site and seeing a dead body and then going on to their family and telling them they won't be coming home."
A fatal accident almost 10 years ago at family-owned Warburtons in which an employee was run over by a reversing artic led the UK's largest independent baker to overhaul its handling operations. Although Warburtons considered its risk assessment to be adequate, it did introduce safety precautions relating to the handling of its products and is now confident that reversing accidents have been almost eradicated.
The accident resulted in raised dispatch floors being introduced at all the company's sites and depots. These allow loaves to go directly into any of its 1,000 vehicles with minimal handling. Cameras and monitors were fixed into cabs, as were reversing lights and alarms. Some vehicles were fitted with side access doors. A trial of the enhancements at one of its sites proved successful and they were then rolled out throughout the business.
Kerry Ross, health and safety director, says: "It made managers a lot more confident of our dispatch areas. We do an individual risk assessment on every customer and the driver is involved too. Reversing accidents have been more or less eliminated."
The HSE is running a campaign highlighting the issue of falls from vehicles.
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