Starting Jan. 1, members of the International Powered Access Federation (IPAF) in the UK must report any known mobile elevating work platform (MEWP) accidents involving their employees. The move to mandate accident reporting as a condition of IPAF membership for UK rental companies was agreed at the first meeting of the IPAF UK Country Council and subsequently ratified by the IPAF Council, the federation’s main governing and decision-making body.
“This is the initiative for IPAF,” said Peter Douglas, chairman of the IPAF UK Country Council, who has been leading the accident reporting campaign. “We need to make the industry safer. Go to the IPAF web site. The data collected will help indicate the most common high-risk behaviors. And if we can reduce those risky behaviors, we will gradually reduce the number of fatal and serious accidents.”
According to Douglas, the initial mandate is for UK rental companies to report all lost-time incidents for their employees. But, he added, all members strongly are encouraged to report all accidents, near misses and contractor incidents they are aware of.
“The more information we have, the better we will be armed to reduce accidents in our industry,” said Douglas.
“Companies who commit to report accidents at the IPAF database will be able to confidentially record data and create their own register of accidents,” said IPAF technical officer Chris Wraith. “The system requires companies to ‘sign off’ monthly on their accident records. In return, a dashboard feature analyses the company data in a graphical format, providing a management tool to monitor safety performance.”
Individual companies will be able to compare their safety performance against aggregated results from across all rental company members and recognized industry benchmarks, according to Wraith. “IPAF’s accident reporting system gives the industry the means to comprehensively collect and analyze accident data while providing a valuable management tool to improve safety in the workplace,” he added.