Worker safety highlighted in Wales
Posted: January 9, 2013
Posted in: Workplace Injuries
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has called on employers to focus on real risk after 18 workers lost their lives while at work in Wales last year and 1,213 suffered a serious personal injury.
The HSE wants to see all business rethink workplace safety provisions in the New Year after the number of deaths in Great Britain as a whole failed to show a significant fall in 2011/12.
The 18 deaths and 1,213 major workplace injuries in Wales last year compare to 11 deaths and 1,141 major injuries in 2010/11. Another 4,723 region workers suffered injuries which required at least three days off work in 2011/12, compared to 4,798 in 2010/11.
The latest provisional figures show that nationwide, on average, six in every million workers were killed while at work between April 2011 and March 2012.
Urging employers to make the safety of workers their top priority for 2013, Rosi Edwards, HSE’s Regional Director for Wales, said:
“Each year, instead of enjoying the occasion, families of workers in Wales who failed to come home from work safely spend Christmas and the New Year thinking of absent loved ones.
“Hundreds of other workers who have had their lives changed forever by major injury will be experiencing difficulties of their own.
“When put into this kind of context, it is clear why health and safety in British workplaces needs to be taken seriously. I urge employers to tackle the real dangers that workers face rather than focussing on the trivial or mire themselves in pointless paperwork.”
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