September is ‘Sliptember’, a month-long campaign to raise awareness around slip safety. Its founder, Christian Harris, tells SHP his reasons for launching the initiative.
CREDIT: T.H. Chia/Unsplash
Walking through the store, as he did almost daily, Stanley May, a well-respected member of the local community, known for his love of gardening and his active involvement in local charity events, approached a yellow sign on the floor.
Tragically, the sign didn’t stop Mr May from slipping. It didn’t stop Mr May banging his head on the hard floor. It didn’t stop Mr. May from passing away. And it didn’t stop a £400,000 fine for the Co-Op after this incident in 2015.
“For AXA UK, slips alone are the costliest type of health and safety claims, totalling £80m a year. For comparison, manual handling injuries amount to £30m in claims, ” explained AXA’s Douglas Barnett, its Director of Mid-Market and Customer Risk Management in a 2018 blog.
Consider this, AXA UK holds under 5% of the UK’s public and employer’s liability insurance premiums. That means each year, well over £1.5bn of slip accident insurance claims are paid out. A much higher figure than the one that HSE often quotes slips costing businesses, by the way.
Slips. We all know they are out there. But we often don’t feel that are that serious, or that expensive. Maybe it’s time to give slips a second, closer, more informed look?
Many safety practitioners will feel they are doing a good job in this area already. Yet, over the last 15 years slips not only are consistently the biggest cause of accident, injury and insurance claims in most sectors, but also the data has flatlined. Does this not suggest that ‘good’ isn’t quite good enough?
Some good news: it is possible to achieve a 57%+ reduction in incidents and costs by taking a scientific approach. I call this Slipology.
Using the Slipology method has shown significant results, across sectors:
Let’s not put a yellow sign out and hope for the best.
Let’s not rely on, “our insurance will cover us”.
Let’s not think “it won’t happen to us”.
Instead, let’s take a proactive and scientific approach to make a meaningful difference to slip safety risks in our organisations.
That’s why this month, I am hosting the Sliptember campaign. I’ll be explaining and educating on the benefits of a proactive and scientific approach to slip safety throughout the month of September. This will include:
Join the movement by following me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-harris-slip-safety. You can enter the prize draw here (https://sliptember.slipsafetyservices.com/) or simply by using the hashtag #sliptember throughout September.
Napo has a great animated film about slips and trips – ‘Napo in… no laughing matter’ http://www.napofilm.net