Early in my career, I worked with a business that had two fatalities. Both were working at height. Both entirely different circumstances. Both still with me.
The first incident
A worker who hadn't disclosed a medical condition. He was susceptible to blackouts. Nobody on site knew. He was working at height when he had an episode, fell, and landed on a hard floor.
The failure: a gap in pre-employment health screening. Something that felt like paperwork. It turned out to be the thing that mattered.
The second incident
A lad of about 16. Playing football at the back of the factory. His ball ended up on the roof. He found a company platform, used it to climb up and get it back, fell through a skylight.
He was 16. He was just getting his ball.
The failure: nobody had thought about what happens when someone does something that was never in any risk assessment, because nobody imagined they would do it. There was unsecured access to equipment. A fragile roof with no protection around the skylights.
Two completely different failure modes. One common thread.
Neither of them walked onto that site intending to be in a statistic.
A young worker is seriously injured every 40 minutes in this country and killed every four weeks, according to Hazards magazine. Most of those incidents are preventable. Most of them come down to something that felt like admin, or something that nobody thought to include in the plan.
Pre-employment health screening is one of those things that gets treated as a formality. Until it isn't. And unsecured access to equipment and fragile roofing are risks that only get identified if someone actually looks for them. Not because they are obvious, but because they require deliberate thought about what people on your site might actually do, not just what you planned for them to do.
Those two incidents are a big part of why I do what I do. Not in a grim way. In a this-is-preventable way.
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