Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
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You may recall that in last week’s leader me mentioning that cleaning-related deaths aren’t unusual and that many of these involve workers in Asia cleaning tanks and being overcome by fumes. I suppose it averages out at about one death a week (that I get to hear about – there may of course be many more) and although every one of these people deserves a mention in Cleanzine, I don’t generally like sharing bad news unless something positive can come out of it, i.e. it may be something from which we can learn.
Sadly, yet another cleaner died this week while cleaning a tank – this time in Mumbai - having been overcome by fumes. I’ve included the piece below, partly because of a comment Brightwell Dispensers’ Rachel Halliday posted on our Facebook page following last week’s broadcast:
“Great leader, as always Jan! Health and Safety is so important in all walks of life. As an industry we need to work on reporting near misses, which can be seen as a chore, to minimise future risk and make all our workplaces safer.”
I'd never thought about officially reporting near misses before and haven’t been asked to do so by anyone for whom I’ve worked… although since our health & safety laws do make us responsible for the safety of others as well as ourselves, this has to involve warning others of hazards we’ve noticed and perhaps narrowly avoided.
I’ve never been asked to record any such information in the accident book though…
If there isn’t a formal procedure in place to identify potentially dangerous patterns (such as people regularly being overcome by fumes whilst cleaning sewage tanks and pipes) then I think there should be. My daughter’s in emergency planning so this is something I should have thought of before…
Do you ask your employees to record near misses or as an employee have you been asked to do so? If the answer is ‘yes’, does your organisation monitor the entries and identify potential dangerous patterns and do something to put a stop to them? Or is it a case of shrugging your shoulders and hoping whoever’s had the near miss, warns colleagues of the potential dangers?
I’d love to know…
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Yours,
2nd November 2017