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Alison Withers
Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers Falling from a height accounted for up to 46 deaths and more than 3,350 injuries in 2006 in the UK, the biggest single cause of accidents in the work place. Some examples from 2010 include a 57 year-old who suffered a broken leg and crushed ankle when he fell eight feet onto concrete while dismantling shelving, a labourer aged 43, who fell to his death when a safety guardrail failed while he was working on a new building and whose company was fined a total of £160,000, and another building company and its director were fined a total of £30,000 after a worker fell nearly thirty feet from scaffolding at a building site sustaining severe injuries. The EC is currently introducing new directives to tighten the safety regulations in an efforto to reduce the numbers of accidents. It is clear, however, that if workers are to work at a height, as is the case with both high level cleaning and in construction work, they must be properly trained, risk assessments must be carried out and there must be secure safety. The Work at Height Regulations apply to all work at height where there is a risk of a fall liable to cause personal injury. They place duties on employers, the self-employed, and any person who controls the work of others. It is the responsibility of these people to ensure that all work at height is properly planned and organised. This also includes paying attendion to weather conditions that might endanger health and safety. Those in charge must also ensure that those involved in work at height are trained and competent, that the place where the work is to be done is safe. Any equipment must be appropriately inspected and the risks from fragile surfaces and from falling objects must be properly controlled. This involves assessing how high the job is from the ground, what surface the access equipment will rest on and whether it is strong enough to take the weight of the workers and their equipment? The ground condition under the area where access equipment might need to be set up is also obviously important as is the access equipment itself. In some circumstances weather conditions will also play a part Employers must also ensure that proper records are kept of all the measures taken and kept safe from loss and unauthorised interference, so that a printed copy can be supplied when required. Periodically all buildings need high level cleaning, particularly if they have high ceilings and their activities over time will mean that deposits of dust, smoke or grease accumulate eventually to a level where they might drop onto people and equipment working below. Taking all the health and safety requirements into consideration, however, if a company needs high level cleaning services it would be prudent perhaps to leave it to a specialist commercial cleaning company with the knowledge and expertise to do it all properly. Even then the company awarding the contract should ensure it has copies of all the relevant paperwork and should take steps to make sure its own staff are not put at risk during such work.
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