One of the most important aspects when establishing whether your business premises is a safe and secure place to work is to ensure that slips and trips are kept to a minimum by regularly risk assessing your work environment. This is not only imperative to help prevent your workforce from injury and to keep staff safe but also to protect yourself, as a business, both from financial losses and from a reputational point of view.
When undertaking slip or trip risk assessments there are so many factors to take into consideration making it hard to know where to start. Here at National Testing we have compiled 5 handy tips in order to help get you started.
Tip 1: Inspecting Floor Hazards
Take a look at the flooring area; is there anything that could increase the chances of a fall? The main hazards causing workplace slips and trips include:
Trailing cables - ensure that any cables are either secured appropriately or are removed from heavy footfall areas
Wet Floors - are there any areas that are prone to wet floors for example areas that suffer regularly from spillages?
Uneven floor surfaces - Check for any uneven surfaces, especially when one flooring material meets another.
Tip 2: Visibility and Lighting
Another major aspect when risk assessing for trips and slips is lighting and visibility. Check for any areas that may be poorly lit and look into ways of improving this. Examples could include simply increasing the amount of lighting available or looking into the placement of the artificial light in the affected areas. Lighting and visibility is especially important in areas such as stairwells, slopes and areas where the level of flooring changes as these pose a larger risk than regular flat surfaces.
Tip 3: Flooring Material
Assessing the flooring material itself has a huge impact on reducing the amount of trips and falls in the workplace. Simply having the correct material for the right situation means increased safety. Take the example mentioned previously about a floor that is prone to spillages, having a material that performs well when wet means more grip and less scope for injury.
Tip 4: Slip Testing & Professional Risk Assessments
Ensuring that you have confirmation by a specialist pendulum slip testing company means you have the documentation to provide should there ever be any need for a legal defence. At National Testing our safety advisors not only carry out floor slip tests throughout the UK as recommended by the HSE but we can also offer impartial, cost effective advice on solutions to help further reduce any potential dangers using our industry knowledge that has been built up from many years of testing them (both good and bad ones!).
Tip 5: Regularly Assess
As with anything in the modern world, changes to your business environment are inevitable. We recommend that your premises is are regularly monitored and reviewed not only in response to future renovations or changes to the work environment but also because of deterioration of flooring, lighting and even changes with staff mobility.
If you require professional help risk assessing your business in order to reduce the risks of slips and trips at your premises or would simply like to book a pendulum slip test then contact our team today, we're always happy to help.