Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Following a few recent blogs regarding H&S incidents I thought I’d share these little cartoons we found depicting the different terminology for various incident types.

The first image seems particularly relevant for both Mark’s and Al’s recent experience with lifting equipment. From reading the blogs it sounds to me like Al’s site experienced and unsafe act when a worker was seen under an unsupported load. Mark experienced an unsafe condition (the poor slinging technique) which led to a near miss (the thing actually fell but no one was hurt).

While of course all of these incident types should be properly addressed, and all have degrees of severity within them, the terminology used can be quite important.

Take, for example, our ever-troublesome scaffolders who failed to properly enforce an exclusion zone on a public-access pavement beneath their work area. They were spotted and the situation was corrected but was this a near miss? Nothing was dropped onto the pavement and no one was injured but the potential was there. This was reported as an unsafe condition (working overhead without edge protection). Had it been labelled a near miss (with the potential to impact the public) we would have had a world of problems.

This may sound like opportunistic word play but it is an important delineation. From a safety point of view it was a very serious occurrence, and was treated as such by all involved, but contractually the wording is vital, similar I suppose to John Holland’s 1P rating in addition to the strict H&S term. The irony of the situation is they were up there erecting a scaffold fan to protect pedestrians from falling objects!

A great deal of fallout resulted of course (revisiting method statements, tool box talks, safety briefings, etc) but the point of this blog was the importance of definitions in contractual communication, and not just in H&S.