The biggest single cause of accidents in the work place in the UK is falling from a height, accounting for up to 46 deaths and more than 3,350 injuries in 2006 alone.
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 following a worker sustaining severe injuries from a fall nearly thirty feet from scaffolding at a building site.
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 put duties on any person who controls the work of others, both employers and the self-employed.
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 means assessing the height of the job from the ground, the kind of surface access equipment will stand on and whether it is robust enough to take the weight of both workers and their equipment?
Obviously also the ground condition under the area where the access equipment is to be set up and the access equipment itself are also important. 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.
Considering all th health and safety requirements, however, it would be prudent for a company in need of high level cleaning to perhaps leave it to a specialist commercial cleaning company that has 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.
Author Resource:
If a company needs work carried out at a height stringent health and safety measures must be put in place to prevent accidents. Ali Withers suggests that a business might be safer having a professional company in to carry out high level cleaning, therefore.
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