Lawford Kidd's Blog

The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) has, this week, made calls for more research to be carried out to find out whether migrant workers face higher health and safety risks, when compared to local workers. If, as expected, migrant workers are at a greater risk, IOSH believes research will help protect to protect these employees.

Language skills, cultural differences and inexperience are all factors which could place migrant workers at higher risk, but IOSH has stated that research so far has shown there is no method of identifying whether there are any specific health and safety risks for migrant workers or not, and therefore more research must be done.

A new campaign to help reduce the number of deaths and injuries on Scotland’s roads has been launched by road safety charity Brake.

Figures show that 172 people were killed and 1,667 seriously injured on Scottish roads last year, and across the UK as a whole there are five deaths and 61 serious injuries every day.

As part of the campaign, Brake and partners RSA and Specsavers have revealed statistics showing that shocking numbers of drivers are senselessly risking lives by flouting traffic laws. There were 105,807 fixed penalty notices issued for ‘careless driving’ and speeding offences in Scotland in 2013 – one every five minutes.

Following a month-long inspection of 1,748 repair and refurbishment building sites, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has issued a clear warning to construction firms to do more to protect their workers from the danger of asbestos exposure.

Worryingly, their investigation found that two in five building sites inspected did not provide adequate protection for staff, and one in five sites were so poor that formal enforcement action was required. Exposure to asbestos was featured on the list of serious failures, but other basic safety failures for people working at height were most prevalent.

The Irish Injuries Board has recently released an analysis of 2013 workplace claims, which reveals that it awarded compensation of €24 million in respect of 826 claims for workplace accidents in 2013, compared to €22 million compensation for 807 awards in 2012.

The average award for a workplace accident last year also increased from €27,286 in 2012 to €28,886 in 2013.

The highest award for a workplace accident last year was €432,000, a substantial increase on the previous year’s figure of €332,143.

An industry-wide campaign to cut the number of deaths from occupational cancer has been launched by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH).  

IOSH highlights that even by conservative estimates, some 8,000 people die from cancer and around 14,000 contract the disease each year in the UK because of exposure to a work-related carcinogen, such as diesel exhaust fumes, silica dust or asbestos fibres. Worldwide, occupational cancer claims the lives of more than 666,000 a year – one death every 47 seconds.

The figures far outstrip those for fatal incidents in the workplace, but the invisibility of carcinogens, the long latency of their effects and a lack of knowledge continue to produce this staggeringly high number of preventable deaths and cancer registrations.