By Gaby Grammeno Contributor

The Guide to preventing slips, trips and falls at work, released by Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, provides practical advice to help managers, supervisors, health and safety representatives and others prevent slips, trips, and falls (STF) in the workplace.

Compensation costs vary according to the severity of the injury, but compensation is often paid out in a lump sum, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. An STF accident can also trigger prosecution by the WHS regulator.

How the guide can help

The guide provides information and examples to understand the common causes of STF and how to ensure people are safe entering, moving around and leaving the workplace.

The guide does not provide advice on incidents involving falls from heights, between levels, or from vehicles. The focus is on slips, trips, stumbles and falls on the same level, or on stairs or ramps. These incidents often result in sudden and/or high acceleration impacts on the body and can result in serious and permanent injuries.

The advice it contains outlines the various factors contributing to STF – those that you can see immediately, as well as factors that aren’t as obvious.

This guide can help you:

  • plan, provide and maintain a work environment that’s safe to enter, move in, and leave
  • decide what actions and considerations will support good planning and maintenance
  • communicate effectively and work with relevant duty holders.

It also lists other sources of practical and more detailed advice including case studies, tools and links, as well as relevant legislation and standards.

Specific STF risks

Preventing STF incidents required attention to all the factors that create the conditions that make an STF incident more likely. The guide sets out detailed advice on:

  • workplace layout and floor surfaces, trip hazards, stairs and ramps
  • outdoor areas and ground surfaces
  • attentional demands, interaction with other workers
  • factors that can influence the pace of work, including production demands, pay incentives, scheduling and deliveries, load handling
  • maintenance, cleaning and housekeeping
  • weather planning
  • visibility and detectability, including lighting, glare and reflections as well as visual contrast
  • training and supervision, consultation and working together
  • footwear
  • characteristics of pedestrians.

The ‘How to use this guide’ section gives pointers on how to quickly find what you need to know, without having to read through the whole 45-page guide. It suggests that if there is a specific incident or situation you need to manage, first look at the topic that you think might be a significant factor (eg floor surface) in the guide. Each section mentions other relevant factors and links (eg to cleaning). The information can help employers better understand and manage the risk.

For example, if a slippery surface is the issue you’re concerned about, the section on floor surfaces explains that safe walking on flooring requires smooth, even and level surfaces with sufficient grip between the floor surface and footwear, and that there is a high risk of slipping or tripping when the installed flooring does not suit the combination of expected work activity, possible contaminants and the characteristics of people using the area.

It lists key issues to consider when assessing flooring for a potential slip risk, including grip or friction for safe walking when dry and if wet and factors affecting grip, types and amounts of expected contaminants likely to be on the floor, the cleaning program appropriate for the type of flooring and expected contamination, and any risk of falling when walking between areas with different types of flooring material.

It also covers objective and subjective measures of floor slipperiness, slip resistance measurement, selecting and correctly installing the most appropriate flooring and treatments to improve grip or slip resistance of flooring.

What it means for employers

Injuries from STF can be enormously costly for employers, as well as the pain, suffering and disruption to the lives of people who fall. The direct costs of compensation and lump sum payouts are often dwarfed by the indirect costs in lost productivity and time dealing with incidents and their fallout, which may include prosecution by the WHS regulator, fines and court costs.

The advice in the new guide is detailed, practical, and applicable to any workplace, including workplaces with consistent conditions like hospitals, as well as ‘dynamic’ workplaces such as construction sites, where environments and tasks are constantly changing.

Employers would do well to use the guide to review and improve STF prevention measures in their own workplaces.

Read the guide

Guide to preventing slips, trips and falls at work