Euro drive for safe maintenance

Maintenance work is key to any organisation running a safe and reliable operation. If well-planned it can save time and money, and yet is often overlooked as an inconvenience and simply a disruption to normal service. To help change this, the Health and Safety Executive is leading Britain’s launch of a new safety initiative.

The European Healthy Workplaces Campaign on Safe Maintenance is coordinated by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), and in Britain has support from organisations representing employers, workers and other interested bodies, including the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and EEF The Manufacturers’ Organisation. The campaign runs until November 2011.

We have added a simple ‘one stop shop’ safe maintenance section to our website where you can find a quick and easy checklist to assess how good your business’ current maintenance practices are and get pointers on how you might improve how you and your colleagues do things. Free downloadable fact sheets, posters, and information on how to get involved are all available and may be useful to anyone involved in maintenance.

The focus is on safe maintenance because maintenance-related incidents are a real cause for concern amongst our inspectors, and the general safety of these operations can often be an indicator of how well an employer is managing safety overall. It’s estimated that around a quarter of all deaths in the manufacturing industry result from maintenance activity, with common causes of fatality and injury being falls from height and a failure to properly isolate machinery so that it doesn’t restart while being worked on. To minimise the risk to workers and the public, good planning is essential. Having someone with the right skills and tools to do the job means any maintenance work from repairing a conveyor to fixing a roof is done efficiently and safely allowing you to get on with your normal business activity.

The initiative is particularly geared towards managers in small to medium enterprises who commission maintenance, workers and their representatives who carry out maintenance operations and managers in organisations (particularly SMEs) that carry out contract maintenance. Production managers are a less obvious but important target due to their influence over the procurement of maintenance and the need to understand maintenance issues when liaising with maintenance workers, to avoid unhelpful pressures that could unintentionally lead to injury or ill-health.

No matter what the size and purpose of your organisation, you should take the opportunity the Safe Maintenance campaign provides, to look at how you plan and manage maintenance work to see where improvements could be made.

We realise that workers are often under pressure to complete jobs quickly, but there really is no excuse for cutting corners on safety. Rather than costing time and money, properly planned and executed maintenance work will lead to increased production and better service delivery. The benefits are not only a safer workforce, but more efficient repairs so normal service can be resumed as quickly and as safely as possible.

For more information on the Safe Maintenance drive in Britain, visit: www.hse.gov.uk/safemaintenance For more information on the Europe-wide campaign, visit: www.osha.europa.eu/en/campaigns/hw2010

Rob Olsen, HSE