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In 2016 there were 137 deaths due to workplace accidents, add to this the 621,000 non-fatal injuries suffered by employees during 2015/16. Add to this the 44,000 injuries caused by moving machinery, and you will realise that despite the greatest of efforts to curtail these occurrences there is certainly room for improvement.
These incidents are tragic where loss of life is concerned, perhaps life-changing for those who were not fatally injured and fortunately for some, nothing more than an inconvenience on a personal level if the injury was very minor. For a business, however, there is a catalogue of problems to deal with in the aftermath of these occurrences.
There is the possibility of production downtime, litigation, and fines from injured parties, damage to the reputation of the employee and of course striving to ensure these incidents, however minor or tragic hopefully never happen again.
The focus on safety at the design stage of equipment is something that DesignSpark has been looking into closely over the past few years. In this interesting article in Connected Thinking, we take a deeper look into what can be done by employers who use machinery and the manufacturers of that equipment, to help reduce potential incidents as much as possible.