From the start of next year, rental-company members of the International Powered Access Federation (IPAF) must report mobile elevating work-platform (MEWP) accidents involving their staff for inclusion on the group’s accident database.
The accident-reporting campaign has been led by Peter Douglas, chair of the IPAF UK Country Council. Describing it as “the initiative for IPAF”, he said: “The data collected will help indicate the most common high-risk behaviours. And if we can reduce those risky behaviours, we will gradually reduce the number of fatal and serious accidents.”
He continued: “The initial mandate is for UK rental companies to report all lost-time incidents for their employees. But all members are strongly encouraged to get on board and report all accidents, near misses and contractor incidents they are aware of – the more information we have, the better we will be armed to reduce accidents in our industry.”
Explaining the benefits to individual members, IPAF technical officer Chris Wraith said: “Companies that commit to report accidents to the IPAF database will be able to confidentially record data and create their own register of accidents.
“The system requires companies to ‘sign off’ monthly on their accident records. In return, a dashboard feature analyses the company data in a graphical format, providing a management tool to monitor safety performance. Individual companies will be able to compare their safety performance against aggregated results from across all rental-company members and recognised industry benchmarks.”
All manufacturers, rental companies, contractors and users are encouraged to report any known fatal and serious accidents involving MEWPs worldwide at www.ipaf.org/accident
