Businesses and their employees are exposed to significant risk due to a lack of awareness for workplace slips, trips and falls (STF), new research from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and insurer RSA has revealed.
With nearly 3,000 respondents, RSA and RoSPA’s report found that 60% of decision makers do not have a dedicated STF prevention programme. Some businesses also reported losing in excess of 100,000 hours, or 4,167 days, working time per year due to STF and separate data from RSA revealed that the average claim for STF is £25,000.
Among the issues examined by RoSPA and RSA’s research was the lack of attention given to the risks associated with STF in the workplace. One reason was that many respondents felt it more necessary to focus on wider scale events such as inflation, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine. “There are real problems and challenges for employers and employees to deal with without making new ones up,” said one of the respondents.
“We understand businesses and decision makers are under significant pressure with everything that is happening both inside and outside of their businesses, but workplace slips, trips and falls haven’t gone away,” said Andy Jones, risk consulting director at RSA. “The research highlights that an increased focus on this type of risk is clearly needed for us to move the dial, enabling businesses to better manage and drive out STF incidents.”
The study also asked respondents for their view on what methods are effective and ineffective for preventing STF. Basic housekeeping standards were seen as fundamentally important in preventing workplace accidents along with proper training, which respondents linked with management involvement, workforce ownership, and accountability. The use of posters and signages correlated with the least effective methods of preventing STF, indicating that businesses need to carefully consider how to best communicate their STF prevention messages.
“The results show that there is a significant proportion of business decision makers who really don’t see STF as important,” said Nathan Davies, executive head of policy and portfolio at RoSPA. “The very fact that inevitability, inaction and blame was prevalent in this report suggests that STF are essentially a hidden issue for many employers. More specific action is clearly needed in many, many workplaces in the UK. The negative perceptions and beliefs portrayed in the report, need to be challenged. Business decision makers need to be educated on the causes and direct and indirect effects of STF. These decision makers would also clearly benefit from support on how to put in place effective prevention strategies.”
“Employers need to better understand both the human, as well as financial costs, associated with this type of accident and understand they are not inevitable and can be managed,” added Jones. “We need to move from a ‘it’s human nature’, ‘it can’t be managed’, ‘it’s unpreventable’, type attitude to more of a ‘we recognise the cost and importance of preventing STF’s and we are taking preventative measures to eliminate this risk from our business.”
