Equipment and Machinery Musts: Ways to Maintain a Safe and Healthy Workplace
The modern industrial workplace environment is packed with equipment and machinery that helps to improve efficiency and productivity but it also needs to be a safe and healthy workplace.
Staying safe around your machinery and equipment always has to be a priority over meeting output deadlines although there is no reason why you can’t adopt practices that allow you to achieve both goals.
Here is a look at how to achieve those aims. There is an overview of why machinery safety is so important, an insight into the benefits of regular equipment maintenance, plus some tips on adopting good lifting practices in the workplace.
Avoiding injury
Practicing good machinery safety is vital as there are so many potential dangers and scenarios that could cause injury or even death.
Any lapse in concentration or flaws in your safety procedures could see someone being struck or injured by moving parts or loose materials being ejected. There is also the constant threat of burns and electric shock is safety procedures are not followed at all times.
This is why you need to carry out a regular and comprehensive risk assessment of your workplace environment and all of the equipment and machinery being used.
You can view a useful reference on using circuit breakers as a way of protecting anyone using the machinery from suffering an electrical shock, and there are other similar initiatives that will all contribute towards a safe workplace.
Regular maintenance is key
Regularly maintaining all of your equipment and machinery is a real win/win situation because it will reduce the prospect of breakdowns which is good for efficiency and productivity, and it will reduce the risk of injury.
If you follow a regular maintenance program with your machinery it gives a better opportunity to spot any defects and faults. This can have a big impact on reducing the prospect of a subsequent accident and will also mean that you are complying with The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations and any other applicable statutory requirements that are relevant to you.
Safe lifting
One of the major causes of industrial injuries is when safe lifting procedures are not observed or a lack of safety training has led to an injury being sustained.
If you are using any sort of lifting equipment the basics of good safety are that everyone in the workplace has a good level of training on how to operate lifting machinery and understands the potential risks through safety awareness training.
Items being lifted don’t always have a perfect centre of gravity and that is just one of the many reasons why any operator lifting equipment needs to know how to weigh up all the relevant factors before carrying out a lift. Fortunately there are manual handling risk assessment tools available that can help with this.
It should also go without saying that any equipment that uses an electrical supply needs to be tested and inspected regularly so that you minimize the prospect of an electric shock and help to avoid the equipment becoming unsafe during use.
Maintaining a safe and healthy workplace has obvious benefits and it always pays to be proactive on this subject.
Sienna Baxter is an electrical safety officer and writes about electrical safety and workplace safety in her articles which appear on a range of blogs.