Today (11th June 2024) sees the launch of the UKMHA’s annual National Forklift Safety Day initiative. Breaking from the approach of previous years, the 2024 campaign will stretch over seven months from June to December, with an allocated day each month where focus will be placed on a different strategy for the safe use of manual handling equipment.
The program, underpinned by its slogan ‘Prevent—Manage—Learn,’ will focus on the seven stages of the forklift incident cycle. Relevant and informative content will examine one stage each month. The ultimate goal of this extended campaign is to enhance workplace transport safety and minimise the impact of manual handling equipment incidents.
Forklift incidents are all too common, and forklifts are widely recognised as the most dangerous type of workplace transport, being involved in around a quarter of all workplace transport accidents. Â On investigation, it is often revealed that many of these incidents could have been avoided had better practices and sufficient training been in place.
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The programme will be delivered as follows:
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11th June – Prepare
The first step is to take a proactive approach to safety. Accidents can happen for all sorts of reasons, so it’s important to Prepare for an incident and take actions that reduce the chance of an incident becoming an accident.
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10th July – Respond
Respond, the next stage of the incident cycle examines what to do in the immediate aftermath of a forklift accident.
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8th August – Investigate
It’s always important to learn from every incident, and this is achieved by thorough investigation. The third stage of the campaign, Investigate, will provide essential tips for undertaking forklift incident investigations.
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13th September – Report
The next stage will look at how to efficiently Report following an incident. This stage will discuss RIDDOR and LOLER reporting and what follow-up actions to expect.
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12th October – Restart
The Restart stage will investigate how production can be safely restarted after an incident and discuss vital post-incident topics, including the importance of training and thorough examination.
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10th November – Learn
Every incident provides a valuable learning experience, which is a key part of workplace safety strategies. The Learn stage will examine the resources that help companies and professionals learn from mistakes and pinpoint operational areas that require improvement.
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9th December – Prevent
Prevent will examine the most effective prevention strategies people should implement to ensure that forklift incidents do not occur. This topic covers near miss and good catch reporting, as well as how to spot the warning signs of imminent danger.
How does ZoneSafe help businesses to apply the Prevent, Manage, Learn approach?
Prevent: ZoneSafe helps businesses take a fully proactive approach to safety by alerting drivers and pedestrians to risk, crucially before an accident or collision occurs. By raising awareness at a critical moment, workers can stop their activity and remove themselves from danger.
Training, risk assessment and robust procedures provide the foundations of preventative safety. ZoneSafe is applied to complement prevention strategies, becoming a normal part of workplace safety procedures and or/PPE.
Manage: If and when an incident occurs, it must be efficiently managed to minimise its impact on both those directly affected and the wider workforce and business. ZoneSafe creates segregation and raises situational awareness to help prevent these incidents from occurring in the first place.
Valuable real-time data is collected while the system is in use. This data can be used to identify high-risk areas and dangerous worker behaviour and to restrict personnel access if necessary.
Learn: Each incident should be used as a learning opportunity. ZoneSafe data management enables thorough investigation and analysis of every incident or near miss event. Data is stored in the cloud and easily downloaded to provide access to critical information that can be used for investigation and future training programmes.
You can find out more about National Forklift Safety Day 2024 and previous years initiatives here – https://nationalforkliftsafetyday.co.uk
