Slips, Trips, and Falls
Monday, November 2, 2020 Ariana Naumovski
When it comes to safety, can anything truly be 100% preventable? What about slips, trips, and falls? Can we thoroughly prevent these accidents from occurring? The good news is, of course we can! Slips, trips, and falls are 100% preventable. In 2016 alone, there were almost 700 fatalities from falls according to the National Safety Council. This is the second-highest cause for fatalities in the workplace; motor vehicle fatalities being first. The resulting injuries end up costing companies a whopping $61 billion a year in disability claims alone. That’s a significant amount of money companies and organizations can save if they just eliminate or control these hazards in the first place.
OSHA has set a number of regulatory requirements we must follow to help reduce our risk of slip, trip, and fall hazards; in both general industry and construction. Some of these regulations include: Subpart D – Walking-Working Surfaces which adds ladders, stairways, dock boards, and scaffold regulations. Sometimes these regulations aren’t always enough and that’s because there are many factors that play into slip, trip, and fall accidents. We want to make sure that we are taking all factors into consideration when addressing both slip, trip, and fall hazards and accidents.
Identifying the factors that play a role, slip, trip, and fall accidents can significantly prevent them from occurring once they are controlled in some way, shape, or form. Work practices and engineering controls can help with this. A few examples of these controls are as follows:
Slip, trips, and falls are a common accident throughout many different industries. They can be fatal or cause a life-changing injury. Either way, we want to prevent them all. And when we reduce the number of slip, trip, and fall accidents occurring at our organization, we create a happier and healthier working environment for our employees and gain a financial benefit from it as well.
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