It was reported last week that an engineer had died after he was injured on Friday morning while working at the Corus steelworks in Scunthorpe in UK.

Emergency services were scrambled to the site at around 8.25 AM and police immediately cordoned off the area following the incident.

The firm said it had started a joint investigation with the Health and Safety Executive into the incident.

I have been passed on the inital feedback and lessons learned so health and safety professionals can learn from this.

corus-fatal-accident

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How will this help your business?

There are many ways that this service can help your Health And Safety Business here are a few.

1. Visitors to the About Health And Safety blog are able to subscribe to RSS feed and get this information straight to their preferred  news reader meaning that the news is going straight to the interested parties.

2. The feed is picked up and used by other publishers of both online and offline media, which means that your message goes further. Not only does this help spread the message if used it will increase the amount of links you get from the release.

3. Search engines love blogs and blog content can be listed with the major search engines within hours and sometimes less than an hour. The links that you can include in the release will help your own sites search engine rankings.

4. Readers get the chance to make comments on the post, this not only gives you immediate feedback on your news, but also user generated content again increases the popularity of an article, so this will boost ratings even more.

This is a new service and I am offering it free of charge until the end of May 2010 with no restriction.

Interested parties should contact Gary using the contact form on the website

Forum marketing is not new it has been around since the beginning of the internet and has been and still is one of the most effective ways to promote your business.
Follow these guidelines and you will see a good response and maximise the marketing opportunity for yourself and/or you business.

Use a credible nickname.

If you are using the forum to promote your health and safety business make sure that you use a credible nickname something that shows you are professional. You could use your business name or dare I say it your real name. By doing this you show that you have nothing to hide and that you are proud of yourself and your work. This approach will create trust from other members of the forum and will reflect positively on your business image among them, creating good publicity.

Treat others as you would wish to be treated.

Not everyone has the same knowledge and experience in health and safety as yourself in your specialist area, there will be a time when you want to find out something that you are not an expert in, remember this. The great thing about health and safety forums is that they attract a mix of individuals all looking for something slightly different. Treat them kindly and they will pay it back later.

Use your signature.

On the forum there is an option to have a signature which is displayed under any and every post you make. By having a professional looking signature that mentions your business and links to it and by being seen as an authority by always providing polite and helpful answers on the forum you literally create a free advertisement for your company or yourself. The other often overlooked advantage of the signature is that it provides back-links to your website or blog. This should not be overlooked as it has a massive advantage, search engines love forums it’s a fact. So every time you post a question, raise a debate or help somebody out with a query you create a link to you own business, that the search engines will pick up and this in turn will improve your search engine ratings.

Use polls.

A great tool that is available on the forum is the voting or/ poll tool. Use this tool, and you can ask questions to any other members in the forum. The others members will vote the answers they think are correct. This tool can be used to help you gather opinions very quickly, and could be a valuable tool for marketing research or product launch or testing.

Be discreet.

Be discreet in promoting your business. The last thing any member wants is to be sold something. It is far more effective to become a magnet and pull people to your business because you have established credibility through helpful answers and interesting posts instead of just blasting your business down others throats.
You can refer members to your company website, but only if it provides specific answers to the question being asked. Once again, members of a forum hate the feeling of being sold but they will be attracted to you and your business if you provide solid, quality responses to their questions.
Be consistent.
Don’t use the forum for week post lots of questions and then disappear for a couple of months, become a usual and useful suspect, again this will help build your credibility within the community.

Quality not Quantity.

Whilst quick replies and one word answers, yes or no will create your link it will not do much for your overall reputation and will not attract people to you or your business.
Explore the topic in discussion, elaborate on your opinion and raise your views on the subject if you can, be slightly controversial if appropriate but don’t ever get into a dispute.
These techniques will help you turn your time already spent on the Internet and a health and safety forum into a viable and free marketing tool.

I hope this helps your health and safety business.

The popular destinations have all been hit for big payouts for trips, slips and falls.

Surely this is further evidence that every walk of life is being blighted by the growing compensation culture.

Some of the more incredible claims include a woman who fell into a moat while trespassing at Carlisle Castle at 2am.

She suffered pelvic and hip injuries and received £15,000 from English Heritage, which also paid her legal costs of £37,250.

The V&A had to pay £400 to a man who put his thumb in hot soup in the museum’s restaurant. The man had found the food counter unattended and helped himself to the soup, scalding himself in the process.

Figures published in the Sunday Telegraph show 24 organisations, which cover hundreds of individual sites between them, had paid out at least £2,149,345 in compensation payments and legal costs in the last five years.

Last night critics hit out at the rise in compensation culture across the UK saying it could have a financial impact on many attractions.

In many cases, organisations had to pay out far more in fees to the claimant’s lawyers than to the claimant themselves, prompting criticism of so-called ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers.

In most cases, the payouts were made by insurance companies but the costs would have been passed on in higher premiums.

The Carlisle  payout was the largest made by English Heritage. The woman fell into the moat in 2003 but the legal case was not resolved until 2007/08.

A spokesman for English Heritage said: ‘The woman passed a sign stating that our opening hours were 10am to 4pm as well as a notice saying ‘Please take care, historic sites can be hazardous’.

‘She can have been in no doubt that she was not entitled to enter and was trespassing.’

I find it really interesting that there is no mention of the women being prosecuted for trespassing.

A Tory policy document, “Regulation in the post-bureaucratic age”  (source) announced by shadow business Secretary Ken Clarke at the party’s October 2009 conference says that they might be.

A Conservative government would allow “low risk” firms to opt-out from HSE inspections, with qualifying firms allowed to bar the watchdog from their premises. What does this mean for the authority of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE)?

The policy document states that “all too often, inconsistent and intrusive visits from officials checking whether they are complying with each set of regulations. Some organisations are subject to so many regulators that they face potentially continuous sequential inspections on a rolling basis throughout the year. Even worse, the recommendations and action points from each successive inspection report may bear no relation to its predecessors, so inspectors may recommend mutually contradictory actions. For example, Health and Safety may require a particular door to be locked shut, while the Fire Authority may demand it is unlocked or open at all times.”

Does this not seem to make the role of these bodies a little simplistic?

The policy also states that “inspectors may focus on organisations which are easier to inspect, or which they know will react positively to their recommendations, rather than the high risk places that really need attention.” I guess to some degree we may have all seen an element of this at some point.

One section of the document titled “Intuition And Common Sense” says “Most areas of life work on intuition and common sense, based on society’s normal expectations. Criminal law is a good example: people are not legal experts but know broadly what is right and wrong, otherwise we would all need legal advisers every time we walked down the street.” Don’t we need to ask ourselves why do people break the law or more on topic why do people have accidents, when most are preventable?

What about the section titled “Personal Responsibility And Bad Luck”

Regulated organisations such as employers and providers of goods and services should be entitled to expect reasonable levels of personal responsibility from their staff, customers or volunteers, and regulations should not make the organisation responsible if they do not get it.

The reasonable standard will vary, of course, particularly where an organisation is in a powerful position compared to its staff, customers or volunteers but, in designing and implementing regulations, we need to recognise that there will always be some instances where staff, customers or volunteers suffer some form of detriment even though their employer or product provider has taken reasonable steps to protect them. We need to be careful not to regard this as a failure for which blame or legal liability needs to be attached. Sometimes bad things happen and no-one should be legally liable. We cannot and should not try to deny the existence of bad luck, nor should we pretend it is possible or desirable to legislate risk out of our lives entirely.

What are your views?

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Sims Group UK Ltd previously pleaded guilty to an offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 after delivery driver Adrian Turner, 50, of Wolverhampton, died after being hit by a falling bale of scrap metal at the Sims Metal site, Newport Docks, on April 28, 2008.

The bale fell from a pile being worked on by Sims worker Stephen Luckett when Mr Turner was unloading his lorry.

Mr Luckett, 40 of Frobisher Road, Somerton, was acquitted of his manslaughter following a trial last month.

Gregg Taylor, prosecuting, told Cardiff Crown Court, there was confusion among workers about the correct procedure for operating cranes when pedestrians were working nearby.

Some workers said they were unsure about the safe distance that should be left between the crane and the worker on the ground and some said they did not know they should stop operating the crane when pedestrians were nearby, the court heard.

Mr Taylor said the company also failed to update safety guidelines following an accident at the firm’s Avonmouth site in which a delivery driver received serious head injuries when he was hit by a 15m metal bar, which also fell from a scrap metal pile.

Prashant Popat QC, defending, said Sims had an excellent health and safety record and took the matter very seriously.

He said workers were given a full safety induction and regular inspections and risk assessments were also carried out as well as safety audits several times a year.

But he accepted that some practices such as lowering the grab arm when pedestrians were in the area and safe working distances, had been misinterpreted by some workers.

Since the accident the company has carried out a health and safety review at all its European sites and has introduced new safety measures, he said, including a video which all visiting drivers must watch before entering the site.

Two additional workers, known as banksmen, have also been introduced to monitor drivers unloading their lorries to ensure safety.

The Recorder of Cardiff, Nicholas Cooke QC, fined the company £200,000 and ordered them to pay £5,000 in funeral and out of pocket costs to Mr Turner’s widow as well as £57,500 legal costs to the Health and Safety Executive.

He said he was satisfied that standards had fallen short on a local level but said he was satisfied that it was not a company-wide issue and that measures to prevent it happening again had been put in place.

Full review carried out

A spokeswoman for the company said: “Sims Group UK Limited offers its sincere condolences to the family and friends of Adrian Turner who was killed in this tragic incident.

“Sims takes health and safety extremely seriously. The company has made every effort to prevent such a tragedy from happening again and a full review of the scrap handling process has been undertaken.”

 http://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/8101241.City_death_case_firm_fined___200_000/