Lawford Kidd's Blog

Two Scottish engineering businesses have been fined for safety failings after a worker’s hand was crushed while helping a forklift truck driver to unload steel beams.

The 54-year-old was an HGV driver and had delivered the beams to a company in Stirling. He was standing on the flatbed trailer while a forklift began to unload the second bundle of steel. As it was lifted, the steel became unstable and rolled away from the forklift truck. The metal strapping broke and the beams separated, falling towards the driver.

He attempted to jump out of the way but was hit by one of the beams which trapped his feet against the flatbed trailer. He fell towards the ground with his feet still trapped and put his right hand down to break his fall.

A new study from the University of Surrey has highlighted the potential risk to worker health from shift work after it found that the daily rhythms of our genes are disrupted when sleep times shift.

Researchers placed twenty-two participants on a 28-hour day in a controlled environment without a natural light-dark cycle.  As a result, their sleep-wake cycle was delayed by four hours each day, until sleep occurred 12 hours out of sync with their brain clock and in the middle of what would have been their normal ‘daytime’. The team then collected blood samples to measure the participants’ rhythms of gene expression.

During this disruption of sleep timing, there was a six-fold reduction in the number of genes that displayed a circadian rhythm (a rhythm with an approximately 24 hour period). This included many regulators associated with transcription and translation, indicating widespread disruption to many biological processes.

Adequate levels of health and safety regulation and enforcement need to be introduced across the EU, with help for small and medium-sized enterprises to comply, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) has said.

In its submission to a consultation on the EU OSH Policy Framework, Europe’s largest professional body in health and safety has set out its views on how policies are formed across member states to protect people from work-related injury and ill health.

It wants to see the protection of vulnerable groups included in the framework of occupational health management and reporting, and health and safety embedded in the education system.

The temporary grounding of Super Pumas is a “proportionate response” to last week’s fatal accident in the North Sea, said the UK’s largest professional body in occupational safety.

However, an outright ban of the helicopter model, intended to restore confidence in the transport of workers to and from oil and gas platforms, would be “too simplistic” a solution at this stage, warned the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH).

The Helicopter Safety Steering Group, comprising oil and aviation industry representatives, has recommended that all models of the Super Puma series should be grounded for “all commercial passenger flights to and from offshore oil and gas installations within the UK”.