A lighter side to health and safety

A UK-based health and safety communications company has translated a series of its popular posters into Maltese for a leading local firm, as part of a behaviour-based safety campaign to be launched next week.

The UK company, signup2safety .co.uk, which has over 100 overseas clients operating in a myriad of different industries, prefers a humorous approach to health and safety in the workplace.

Director Jay Butler said: "Our aim is to help organisations effectively communicate to their workers the importance of personal behaviour in creating a safe working environment. Subtle use of humour ensures the underlying message is readily understood and memorable, thus promoting a positive attitude towards safe behaviour."

The idea came about after directors saw that the way health and safety messages were put across was in general rather dull, therefore people tended not to pay attention to them.

Mr Butler said the next phase in the development of the health and safety sector was behaviour-based safety - encouraging the individual to be accountable for his or her own actions in the workplace, as well as for creating and maintaining a safe environment at all times. The key to encouraging such attitudes was to get people to "attest" to the information given out by making them like it through humour. "In this case, humour is being used as a serious medium to make a point," Mr Butler added.

According to the National Statistics Office, more than 3,300 accidents happened at the workplace last year, including six fatal ones.

The most recent case was that of 21-year-old Matthew Coleiro, from Siġġiewi, who was crushed to death last Wednesday when about 16 large slabs of marble fell on him as he tried to unload them from a truck.

Following the fatal incident, the Health and Safety Institute of the General Workers' Union said that although the number of fatal accidents had dropped in Malta, it was worried that they still took place. It also questioned whether the time had come to update occupational health and safety regulations.

Last month, a contractor was handed a two-year jail term suspended for four years and fined €10,000 after he admitted that he had not provided safety equipment to a worker who died in a work site accident.

Contractor Andrew Magri, 37, admitted to failing to install warning signs and not erecting railings at a construction site in Riebu Well Street, Rabat where construction worker Carmel Fenech, 54, died after falling three storeys to his death.