Principles of Health and Safety at Work

Allan St John Holt, Jim Allen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317341260
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

This is a reprint of ISBN 978-0-901-35743-4

Widely acknowledged as the one stop summary of health and safety fundamentals, Principles covers law, safety technology, occupational health and hygiene and safety management techniques. Originally written by the late international health and safety expert Allan St John Holt, this new edition has been comprehensively updated by Allan's colleague Jim Allen.

The book is designed as a concise, accessible introduction to health and safety basics and includes revision notes and a wide range of references. It is a first class resource for NEBOSH Certificate students.

Part 1
Safety management techniques

1 Accident prevention

Introduction

Few of the things we do in life are free from risk or uncertainty. As Benjamin Franklin observed as long ago as 1789: “Nothing in this world can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Nevertheless, we order our affairs in the reasonable expectation that things usually turn out as planned. Nobody goes to work prepared to die that day, but sadly some people do. Accident prevention is aimed at spotting what could go wrong and preventing it from doing so, or at least minimising the consequences. Since the subject first received significant attention – from lawmakers about 200 years ago and from research over the past 100 years – we have learned a good deal about the ‘accident phenomenon’.

Accidents are the direct results of unsafe activities and conditions, both of which can be controlled by management. Management is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the working environment, into which workers must fit and interact. Control of this environment is discussed elsewhere in this book. Control of workers and their behaviour is more difficult. They have to be given information, and taught to understand that accidents are not inevitable but are caused.

Workers need training to develop skills, to recognise the need to develop and comply with safe systems of work, and to report and correct unsafe conditions and practices. Their health and safety awareness and attitudes require constant improvement, and the social environment of the workplace must be one which fosters good health and safety practices and conditions, not one which discourages them. Such an environment is known as a positive safety culture.

A primary requirement of management is to appreciate the need to concentrate on the nature of the accident phenomenon, rather than its outcome, the injury or damage/loss. Also, there is a need for awareness that the primary cause of an accident is not necessarily the most important feature; secondary causes, usually system failures, will persist unless action is taken. Thus, a ‘simple’ fall from a ladder may be dismissed as ‘carelessness’, but this label may hide other significant factors, such as lack of training, maintenance, adequate job planning and instruction, and no safe system of work. These topics will be discussed in this Part.

Three statements must be adopted by management in order to achieve success by planning rather than by chance:

1. accidents have causes
2. steps must be taken to prevent them
3. accidents will continue to happen if these steps are not taken.

Accident prevention objectives

Moral objectives derive from the concept that a duty of reasonable care is owed to others. Greater awareness of the quality of life at, and as affected by, work has focused popular attention on the ability of employers to handle a wide variety of issues, previously seen only as marginally relevant to the business enterprise. Environmental affairs, pollution, product safety and other matters are now commonly discussed, and there is a growing belief that it is simply morally unacceptable to put the safety and health of others, inside or outside the workplace, at risk, for profit or otherwise. Physical pain and hardship resulting from death and disability is impossible to quantify. Moral obligations are now more in the minds of employers and business stakeholders than ever before.

A dimension of the moral objective is morale, which also interlinks with the following two objectives. Workers’ morale is strengthened by active participation in accident prevention programmes, and weakened following accidents. Adverse publicity affects the fortunes of an organisation both internally in this way and externally, as reduced public confidence may weaken local community ties, market position, stakeholder confidence, market share and reputation generally.

Legal objectives are given in statute law, which details steps to be taken and carries the threat of prosecution or other enforcement action as a consequence of failure to comply. Civil law enables injured workers and others to gain compensation as a result of a breach of statutory duties or because a reasonable standard of care was not provided under the circumstances.

Economic objectives are to ensure the continuing financial health of a business and avoid the costs associated with accidents. These include monetary loss to employers, to the community and society from injuries to workers, damage to property and work interruptions. Some, but not all, of these costs are insurable and are known as direct costs. Increased premiums will be a consequence of claims, so an increase in overheads is predictable following accidents. Indirect costs include uninsured property damage, delays, overtime costs, management time spent on investigations, and decreased output from the replacement worker(s).

Basic terms

An accident is an incident plus its consequences; the end product of a sequence of events or actions resulting in an undesired consequence (injury, property damage, interruption and/or delay). The incident is that sequence of events or actions. An incident does not necessarily have a definable start or finish. (Think about a road bulk tanker overturning and spilling its contents onto the road and down drains. Can you say when the incident started or finished?) Thus, an injury is a consequence of failure – but not the only possible one.

An accident can be defined more fully as ‘an undesired event, which results in physical harm and/or property damage, usually resulting from contact with a source of energy above the ability of the body or structure to withstand it’. The idea of energy transfer as part of the definition of an accident is a relatively recent one, and one which helps us to understand the accident process.

Hazard means the inherent property or ability of something to cause harm – the potential to interrupt or interfere with a process or person – which is or may be causally related to an accident, by itself or with other variables. Hazards may arise from components which interact with or influence each other, eg two chemicals reacting to produce a third.

Risk is the chance or probability of loss, an evaluation of the potential for failure. It is easy to confuse the terms ‘hazard’ and ‘risk’, and many writers have done so. The terms are often incorrectly used, sometimes interchanged. A simple way to remember the difference is that ‘hazard’ describes potential for harm, while ‘risk’ is the likelihood that harm will result in the particular situation or circumstances.

Another way of defining risk is as the probability that a hazard will result in an accident with definable consequences. In a wider sense, we can look at ‘risk’ as the product of the severity of the consequences of any failure and the likelihood of that failure occurring. Thus, an event with a low probability of occurrence but a high severity can be compared against an event likely to happen relatively often but with a comparatively trivial consequence. Comparisons between risks can be made using simple numerical formulae (see Part 1 Section 3).

Accident ratio studies

There have been several studies on the frequency of the possible outcomes of incidents, and an interest in this was one of the influences on H W Heinrich, an American safety specialist whose Industrial accident prevention was first published in 1931 and became the first widely available textbook for health and safety practitioners. In it, he developed the Domino Theory of accident causation and distinguished between unsafe acts and unsafe conditions as major causative agents (see below). Seventy years ago, he found that less than 10 per cent of all ‘accidents’ result in personal injury. From a study of 75,000 reported accidents, he saw that, on average, for every disabling injury there were 29 less serious injuries and 300 accidents involving no personal injury at all. Much depends on the definitions chosen, but the principle was new then and holds good today.

Heinrich’s work on the outcomes of incidents was repeated by Frank Bird (1969) and in the UK by Tye & Pearson (1974/75) and, more recently, by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Accident Prevention Advisory Unit. The results of frequency outcomes are usually represented in a triangle: The frequencies shown are taken from recent HSE work in five industries, including construction, food and transport. They will vary between employers according to the nature of the hazards and risk levels. ‘Non-injury accidents’ need to be measured, and conventionally this is done by recording incidents resulting in property damage rather than people damage.

The main conclusions that can be drawn from this work are:

• injury incidents are less common than non-injury incidents
• there is a consistent relationship between all loss producing incidents
• non-injury incidents could have been injury incidents, and the outcome in each case is mostly determined by chance.

Overall, because the consequences of incidents are usually distributed randomly throughout a range of outcomes (with death at one end of the range through to property damage and ‘near miss’ at the other), we cannot distinguish usefully between those which result in injury and those that do not. Therefore, it is important to look at all incidents as sources of informa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• About the author and editor
• Introduction
• Part 1 Safety management techniques
• Part 2 Workplaces and work equipment
• Part 3 Occupational health and hygiene
• Part 4 Law
• Abbreviations and index
• Glossary of abbreviations
• Index