We all know that maintaining health and safety at work is a key duty for employers in the UK. As well as simply being the right thing to do, there are legal and financial penalties for failing to do so. For manufacturing companies, where employees can often be engaged in physically demanding activities, it’s particularly important to avoid workplace accidents. As part of a broader health and safety culture, organisations must mitigate against the main causes of accidents. In this blog, we’re looking at how manufacturers can take a proactive approach to avoiding slips, trips, and falls, and how Fidelis plays a part.
Slips, trips, and falls are a major cause of UK workplace accidents
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has regulatory responsibility for managing health and safety at work in the UK. It also collates statistics on workplace accidents. According to the Labour Force Survey of 2019/20,there were 693,000 self-reported non-fatal workplace injuries in that year. Of these, slips, trips, and falls were the biggest single cause, at almost 40% of the total. It’s a serious cost to the economy, as injuries resulted in a loss of 6.3 million working days over the year. And for the manufacturing sector, where the job can be physically demanding, it’s a particular issue. It’s one of the sectors that has a statistically higher than average rate of workplace injury.
Cleaning is an essential way that manufacturing companies can enhance health and safety when it comes to slips, trips, and falls. We work with manufacturing company clients at more than 120 sites across England and Wales. We provide daily cleaning services, augmented by infection control where needed. In fact, there’s not an hour on the clock at which Fidelis isn’t cleaning or servicing a manufacturing facility. Our team works with a fleet of 15 commercial vehicles, from cars and vans to trucks and tippers. Here are three ways that Fidelis helps.
- Clearing up spills and clutter
We can be on hand to clear up spills, so that they don’t become a slip hazard, and we’ll use the right cleaning method depending on the floor type. But good routine cleaning and housekeeping can be as important as ad hoc cleaning when it comes to implementing a health and safety culture at work. That’s why we also got through nearly 357,000 bin bags and 22,000 mop heads at manufacturing company clients last year.
2. Keeping floors free of residue
We know that one leading cause of workplace slips is floors that haven’t been cleaned properly. Sometimes, this is the result of the wrong or low-quality cleaning products. At other times, it can be the wrong dilution rate, which can leave a residue on the floor. We use one range of high-quality, sustainably sourced, specialist products by Clover. This allows our team of 500 fully trained operatives to work quickly and effectively. And we always use the correct dilutions of these products for the task in hand.
3. Being tidy (and visible) while we clean
We know that without careful planning and risk assessment, there’s a danger that cleaning itself can introduce slip and trip hazards. We always make sure that our operatives cordon off cleaning areas, and clearly signpost where they’ve been with caution signs. Indeed, each year for our manufacturing we deploy 237 wet floor signs. What’s more, where we can we’ll use belt-driven traction scrubber dryers. These don’t leave trailing cables behind them, so we don’t add to daily hazards.
We know that manufacturing companies must take health and safety seriously. When they choose Fidelis, manufacturers can rely on us to keep their premises clean, safe, and conforming to regulatory standards. We do all of this with minimal disruption to daily operations. Whenever we’re on site, manufacturers can think of us as part of the team – and part of their health and safety squad.
To see what last year looked like for us in the manufacturing sector, have a look at our infographic.
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