The hospital I work in has loads of slip / trip incidents in the Outpatients area when people are leaving. the hospital. We have painted the kerb edges yellow to highlight them, put up barriers & railings to prevent pedestrians engaging with vehicles, and we try to steer people to crossing points. The problem is the people fall off kerbs, trip over fresh air, dont look where they are going etc, especially as they leave with a mobile phone strapped to their ears, and then submit a claim!!! What more can we do? Obviously the trippers have to take some responsibility. Do we drop all kerbs, Do we have a one way pavement system - not good in evacuation. I am at a loss. Any Ideas? SBH

Are the barriers fences that effectively channel those exiting the building along the pavement towards the actual crossings or bollards where the person can walk between them as preventing them from actually stepping off the curb until a designated crossing would prevent them taking short-cuts. If the latter then perhaps replacing those with actual fence-type barriers would stop them. If however that's been installed and they are still climbing over the fence then falling, I think they would find it difficult to win their case in court as you can show the hospital has taken steps to prevent them crossing at these locations but they didn't observe this. An alternative could be a covered walkway to a dedicated pathway and crossings but would need to check fire evacuation routes etc with fire service so as not to create bottlenecks etc.

Incidents occur when it is dry weather, when the day lighting is at its best. Perhaps we need to investigate designated walkways to crossings SBH

Any CCTV in the area?

SBH The most remarkable feature about your question is the absence of an quantified indicator of what you mean by 'loads'. In relation to David Bannister's constructive observation, Civil claims such as these should only succeed where negligence exists, you are well advised to use objective statistically robust measures to safeguard your organisation against claims of negligence. If someone wishes to claim £5K or more, it's not difficult for them to pay a safety ergonomist to evaluate the conditions in which alleged 'loads' of people fall. He/she can do so by investigating: a. what decision rule you are using to determine that your standard of risk assessment is suitable and sufficient: is it 1 in 1000, 1 in100, 5 in 100, 10 in 100 or what b. what objective evidence you collect to determine the proportion of users of the steps fall c. what scientific methods you use to analyse evidence and to calculate the probability value of a fall to users of different age groups, genders and with different classes o disabilities d. what statistical tests you use to relate the evidence you gather to the decision rule for acceptable number of falls e. how the evidence you gather to apply the decision rule is related to your appropriate scientific methods of preventing falls to 'loads'. He/she could also inform a court how such scientific methods have been in standard use in operations, quality, marketing and HR functions for decades and that there is no objective reason why they can't be systematically used to safeguard 'loads' of people.

Dear SBH, You seem to be doing a heap of things to prevent more incidents, take some encouragement from the fact that slips, trips and falls (commonly on the same level) are the most common cause of major injuries to employees.

I simply said it can be summarised as follows 1 Count the number of people who fall over 2 Put them into categories 3. Decide on your acceptance criteria for the number of people who fall over 4. Record the data for possible evidence / defending a claim Straight to the point, no waffle