Lawford Kidd's Blog

An Essex packaging company has been fined after one of its employees sustained a serious hand injury on an unguarded laminating machine.

Gary Dean had the skin on the palm of his left hand torn away in the incident on 26th September 2011.

He was using a glue laminating machine when he noticed an indent mark on a finished product. He put his left hand into the machine via an unguarded portal to scrape away dried glue residue from a roller that had caused the blemish, but his whole hand was drawn into the roller and the palm of his left hand was de-gloved.

A Leicester door-fitting firm has been fined after an employee was injured when he fell from a wooden crate fixed to a fork lift truck.

The 39 year-old man fractured his wrist, heel, ankle and elbow when he fell nearly five metres while fitting a roller shutter door at a farm in Lincoln.

He needed an operation on his heel and was unable to work for about three months after the incident on 2nd September 2011. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigated and prosecuted his employer for failing to properly plan work at height.

The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) has published details of its response to a HSE consultation over a changes to ‘sharps’ regulations.

In its response, IOSH highlighted the need for people in all professions to continue to be protected when working with sharp medical instruments, and warned the regulator against excluding non-medical workers from the regulations.

Injuries to workers from needles, scalpel blades and other sharp instruments – collectively known as medical sharps – have to be prevented, says IOSH. They can lead to exposure to blood-borne viruses and serious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, from instruments contaminated with patients’ blood or other bodily fluids.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has recently published provisional statistics on workplace ill-health and injury in Scotland in 2011/12.

The figures show that:

• There were 9,551 reported injuries to employees in 2011/12 compared to 10,216 in 2010/11, a fall of 7%.
• 64,000 people said they were suffering from an illness caused or made worse by their work, down from 77,000 in 2010/11.
• 20 workers were fatally injured - up from 14 the previous year. The average for the past five years was 23 worker deaths per year.

The HSE has also revealed that in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available across the EU, the standardised rate of work-related fatal injury excluding traffic accidents was 0.59 per 100,000 workers in GB, the second lowest in the EU.

The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) has claimed that a new clause introduced to the  Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill by the Government has put workplace health and safety back into the Victorian age.

APIL president Karl Tonks explained:

“At the moment, where an employer has been found to have breached health and safety regulations and someone has been injured as a result, the injured person has an automatic right to claim compensation. The law has been clear on this point since a landmark case was brought in 1898.