The IPAF Global Safety Report 2021 analyzes the main causes of serious injuries and fatalities occurring when using powered access machines to conduct temporary work at height, highlighting the need to gather more near-miss data from across the industry worldwide to help avoid the most common types of serious accident in future.
While the report, based on incidents logged in IPAF’s Accident Reporting Portal, indicates the main causes of serious injuries and deaths have not changed significantly across the most recent two years of data, electrocutions have increased slightly to tie the most common cause along with falls from the platform.
Over the whole five-year period, from 2016-2020, the most common causes of fatal incidents were falls from the platform and electrocutions, both accounting for 23 percent of deaths, followed by entrapments (19 percent), MEWP overturns/tip-overs (12 percent), MEWPs being struck by another machine or vehicle (6 percent), or hit by falling object(s) (5 percent).
This year, the report has been presented a different way, with an executive summary giving a global overview, followed by detailed data spreads looking at each of the six main accident types broken down by location, machine type, industry sector, including lost-time-incident analysis specific to each incident classification.
Brian Parker, IPAF’s head of safety and technical, says, “This new format will make the report easier to digest and understand, especially for members of the powered access rental industry, and health and safety representatives at IPAF member companies, as well as end-use contractors of powered access.
“It is more relevant and informative to be able to take a detailed look at electrocutions and falls from the platform, for example, to see what machine type, configuration, location or industry sector these are occurring in, to consider what some of the underlying factors may be and to plan ahead accordingly."
He continued, “The improved reporting portal, launched last autumn and now available in all main IPAF languages, has helped drive up reporting from more countries around the world and gather data from a wider range of industry sectors. This enables deeper analysis to inform all of the work IPAF does to improve safety, technical guidance and training.
“One thing that we all agree on is we must now focus on areas we know we need more data from. This means gathering more information about near-misses ... Near-misses are important in understanding trends and preventing serious accidents in future. We hope that direct access to the reporting portal from the newly launched IPAF ePAL mobile app for operators and supervisors will empower more people to record these sorts of incident – quickly, easily, and anonymously if so preferred."
Visit www.ipaf.org/accident to view or download the IPAF Global Safety Report 2021. And use www.ipafaccidentreporting.org to report all accidents, incidents, and near-misses using powered access equipment.
Information provided by IPAF and edited by Alexis Sheprak.
