Interview: “A clear downward trend in incident rates

What is currently on the agenda of OSRA?

David Starkey: OSRA has followed a consistent remit over recent years, with the main focus on analysing accident rates and causes, linked to development of Safety Alerts and Operational Guidelines to assist CEPE members in preventive and pro-active actions to improve their safety performance. We recently completed a guideline on three-roll-mill safety, and currently are working on documents on materials storage and also an important update to our guideline for loading of high resistivity powders to flammable atmospheres, which is a critical risk area for our industry.

Plus, we maintain our ‘watching brief’ on the operational impact from the increasing number of developments in OSH legislation, standards and substance reclassification proposals both within Europe and globally.

What trends in Operational Safety Performance is OSRA seeing, and where is most attention needed to promote continual improvement?

David Starkey

Chair Operational Safety & Risk Assessment, CEPE

Starkey: OSRA has begun collecting safety performance indicators for the printing ink sector, and looks forward to monitoring fully reported trends at least for one part of the industry. We have seen a clear downward trend in incident rates over the last 5 years, which is now starting to flatten out with a prevalence of relatively minor injuries that are proving harder to eliminate.

The main primary causes are slips, trips, manual handling, trapping and striking incidents. It has not been a smooth progression, with ‘hot spot’ causes in individual companies being reduced via specific actions and then sometimes reappearing when attention is turned to another area. Overall severity is significantly reduced, though there is no room for complacency with occasional high severity injuries still being reported, arising e.g. as a result of fires, falls or being struck by a fork-lift truck.

Deeper cause analysis indicates several areas for attention: The design and organisation of our workplaces, the behaviour of individuals in the workplace and resources deflected to address business pressures in other areas. Actions to address these causes therefore need to focus on the workplace (e.g. visual safety and ‘5S’ programmes) and also on behaviours of both management and workforce. OSRA members are starting to share experiences in these areas, which concentrate on pro-active employee involvement to promote risk awareness, the reporting and improvement of unsafe conditions and correct safe behaviours.