Posted By Carrie Ellerby Morning All, just lately we seem to be having an extremely high number of accidents involving cuts (knife as well as other). We issue PPE for those trimming components (who still seem to be able to manage to cut themselves?) and have carried out numerous assessments and trials with other trimming blades, etc. Unfortunately we have a high number of Agency staff who come and go within a matter of days or weeks and it seems to be these staff who are more liable to cutting themselves in one way or another. I suppose what I'm asking is - can anyone point me in the direction of help in the form of advice on taking care of yourself in the workplace with regards to cuts, i.e. websites, etc? We do stress that any minor accident / near miss is reported so our statistics include small nicks but the figures are getting embarrassing and I really want to do something about it :-/ Cheers, Carrie

Posted By Bev Carrie, Are you putting the agency/new staff through induction, including use of knives? Do you have a high enough level of supervision to make sure they use the PPE and work in the correct manner? Are they paid by piece work, making them work too fast? Just a few thoughts.

Posted By fats van den raad I do know that safety knives are not always the answer. For example, have you ever tried to strip armoured cable using an automatic retracting blade knife. It actually makes the job more hazardous. Your options seem to me to either go down the route of specialised PPE as suggested, or you may want to contact some of the knife manufacturers and investigate specially designed knives.

Posted By Heather Aston Carrie We have a similar situation with agency staff employed to trim and inspect rubber mouldings. Same issue with the knives - we've had several attempts at trials of safety knives with different suppliers but have found nothing that works. PPE is difficult. Kevlar gloves are much better than the old chain mail ones used to be, but they are expensive to issue - not very practical if you might have different employees every week - and they are not very "sensitive" which adds risk to some of our trimming jobs rather than removing it. Knives should be on personal issue so you can pin down who it is that leaves their knife on the bench every time they go to break without putting the blade guard on. This is then an issue to address with the individual. Our main cause - besides being a new worker on their first day - was peple trying to work too fast. We found that if operators are set targets of a certain number to trim, some operators would work at top speed until the target was complete and then have longer breaks. This needs to be discouraged by setting people specific break times and then encouraging them to work at a reasonable pace - not so fast that they end up hurting themselves because of a moment's inattention. Again this is down to good supervision. It may also be worth noting separately in your accident statistics how many are due to agency/temporary staff. I am not suggesting here that you shouldn't treat them just as seriously as those to your own employees, but it sometimes helps to see the underlying trend. Heather