Keeping your employees and your workplace safe should be a top priority for all organisations. The best way to ensure this is through workplace accident prevention. Accident prevention encompasses the actions and strategies implemented to prevent dangerous or fatal events from occurring.
Good accident prevention should be both proactive and reactive, and will evolve with your company’s overall safety management strategy. Accident prevention should include steps to lessen the impact of harm, reduce the loss or damage of company property, ensure your compliance with industry safety standards and reduce the cost of compensation and legal claims. In short, accident prevention should exemplify the safety best practices for your workplace.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the most common causes of workplace accidents and the steps you can implement to prevent them, as well as the ways that technology can help you reduce accident rates. We’ll cover some practical tips for improving your accident prevention programmes and show you how Notify’s digital tools can help make your workforce safer.
What is Accident Prevention?
Accident prevention is fundamental to creating and maintaining a safe, functioning working environment. Of course, it’s nearly impossible for employers to predict the likelihood of every possible workplace accident, but they still have a duty to implement any measures they can to reduce or control their impact. This means looking at ways to prevent physical, operational and behavioural risks, as well as taking appropriate action to mitigate the effects of any accidents that do happen.
Accident prevention is different from other safety management actions, such as hazard spotting, though the two are connected. An accident, as defined by the HSE, is an incident that is ‘separate, identifiable, unintended’ and directly results in physical injury. By contrast, a hazard is something that has the potential to cause harm or damage. Identifying and reporting hazards effectively will help reduce the number of accidents, and so is a key part of your accident prevention strategy.
There are several different types of workplace accidents, with some being more or less common in certain industries.
Common types of workplace accidents include:
- falls, slips and trips
- repetitive strain
- moving machinery
- cuts and burns
- chemical exposure or inhalation
- electrical accidents
Each of these requires its own accident prevention strategy that both employers and employees have a responsibility to stick to.
What is the cost of workplace accidents?
The cost of workplace accidents is not just financial, though those can be significant. The human cost, as well as reputational risks, are huge factors to consider when creating your accident prevention strategy.
From a financial perspective, workplace accidents can result in fines from the health and safety regulator. Costly legal cases, employee compensation and insurance claims can also impact your business financially. In the longer term, accidents and injuries can affect overall productivity in your workplace. Lower productivity can lead to lower profits and, in the case of serious accidents or injuries, impact you financially for months or even years.
Accidents can also expose your company to regulatory risks. If your safety management approach isn’t compliant with your sector’s regulations and best-practice guidance, when accidents occur you could be held responsible for Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violations. This is particularly serious if you have been previously warned about a violation or if you are shown to be wilfully disregarding health and safety regulations. The consequences are not only legal, but also include loss of reputation; if employees, customers and clients see that you are failing to keep your workplace safe from the impact of accidents, they won’t continue to work with or buy from you.
The human cost of accidents is perhaps the most acutely felt. Accidents can result in life-changing injuries and even fatalities, and many of these can be prevented by improving health and safety management. In the UK in 2023-24, 138 employees were fatally injured at work, the majority of whom worked in the construction industry. Accidents can also have a long-term impact on employees, with stress accounting for the majority of missed work days in the UK. At the same time, stress can also be a cause of accidents, as stressed or over-worked employees are more likely to cut corners or miss important processes that could help protect them and their colleagues.
What are the common causes of workplace accidents?
There are many different types of workplace accidents (too many to list in this blog!) and different sectors will be exposed to different kinds of risks. The most common workplace accidents across most industries include slips, trips and falls, or other injuries such as cuts, burns or eye injuries. Repetitive strain and stress are also often recorded and in industries where heavy machinery is used, impact injuries are also common.
No matter what kind of organisation you work in, the root causes of workplace accidents are often similar.
Workplace accidents tend to happen because of one of four key factors: unsafe conditions, human error, inadequate procedures and poor communication around health and safety.
- Unsafe conditions – Poor lighting, cluttered walkways, spillages or faulty equipment are all common examples of unsafe conditions that can cause workplace accidents.
- Human error – Accidents caused by human error can be as a result of fatigue or stress, or more systemic problems like lack of training or negligence.
- Inadequate procedures – If employees are not engaged in (or aware of) procedures like hazard spotting and incident reporting, accidents that could have otherwise been avoided become more likely.
- Poor communication – Even if you are able to head off hazards before they become dangerous, poor communication can let your safety management down. If the appropriate changes are not communicated clearly with your wider team, you still run the risk of that hazard escalating into something more serious.
Proven strategies for Accident Prevention at work
Accidents will happen if you don’t have the right accident prevention strategies in place. Like all aspects of safety management, these strategies require ongoing action and should change and improve with time. So what steps can you take to reduce workplace incidents?
Here are four proven strategies for accident prevention that you should implement across your organisation:
1. Conduct regular safety audits and risk assessments
Being able to determine if an area of your workplace is safe, through safety audits and risk assessments, is the first step in preventing accidents. Safety audit best practice includes four steps: planning, execution, reviewing and implementing corrective actions. Safety audits should be carried out for all areas of your organisation, particularly when a new process is defined or new equipment is being installed. This, coupled with regularly updated risk assessments that are shared and communicated with your team, will help to keep everyone in each area of your workplace safe.
2. Use digital reporting tools to track near misses and incidents
Reporting is a fundamental part of your accident prevention arsenal. Capturing hazards and near misses in your workplace is the most effective way of highlighting where changes need to be made. The best way to do this is with digital reporting tools. Digital tools eliminate the need for messy, complicated paper filing or spreadsheets, making it easier and quicker to report and act on incidents. Digital tools allow you to collate all your data in one place, giving you a comprehensive overview of incident trends and safety blind-spots. With this insight, you can prioritise resource and improvement initiatives in the areas that need them most.
3. Enforce PPE and safe operating procedures
If your employees need PPE to conduct their work safely, this should be enforced without exception. While using PPE alone won’t always prevent an accident from happening, it will reduce the severity of any injury or damage that could be caused. PPE should also be regularly inspected and replaced if it is no longer fit for use; this can happen as part of your safety audit process. The same goes for safe operating procedures. These should be reviewed regularly and staff training should be up to date to ensure that employees can carry out their duties safely and efficiently.
4. Drive a proactive safety culture
The best safety management practices are proactive, not reactive. Driving a proactive safety culture that everyone in your organisation is invested in is a crucial part of accident prevention. Encourage employees to engage with safety management by making reporting easy and accessible, ensure that staff training is thorough and up to date, and make sure safety leaders model good practice themselves. Communicate, communicate, communicate and don’t forget to highlight examples of good safety practice too; it’s important to shout about your safety successes as well as highlighting areas for improvement.
How Notify can empower your to prevent workplace accidents
Making use of technology is great way to improve your workplace safety and Notify Technology has a range of digital tools to help you reduce the likelihood of accidents occurring. With Notify’s health and safety software, your employees can quickly and easily report hazards, near-misses, accidents and injuries from anywhere in your organisation. This data can be viewed in your centralised dashboard, giving you instant
Our free-to-use mobile app makes it easy for your teams to engage in workplace safety, even if they are off-site or offline. With more accurate data being logged in real time, for example via incident reporting or via conducting regular audits and inspections, safety leaders can have more insight into the state of safety management in their organisation. This allows you to get ahead of incidents like near-misses and take action before they escalate and cause accidents and serious harm.
Notify’s health and safety software allows for real-time risk monitoring, with automated alerts and workflow tracking. This way, safety leaders and managers can be alerted whenever an incident is reported, ensure that corrective actions are assigned to the right people and carried out quickly to keep your teams safe.
FAQs about Accident Prevention in the workplace
What is the most effective way to prevent workplace accidents?
There is no one action which, in itself, will prevent accidents in your workplace. Instead, the most effective way to prevent workplace accidents is to adopt a proactive approach to safety culture. This means carrying out regular safety audits and risk assessments, maintaining safe operating procedures, correct use of PPE, supporting employees to engage in safety management and making use of digital tools to simplify and streamline your accident prevention strategies.
How often should safety audits be conducted?
Safety audit frequency will depend on the nature of your workplace and the industry regulations that you follow. For some organisations, this could mean annual audits while for others it could be every couple of months. All organisations should conduct safety audits when adopting new processes or machinery.
What is important is that they are regular and consistent. You can ensure that your audits are carried out regularly by setting reminders and communicating with your teams about their importance. Digital tools like Notify’s audit management software makes this easier, so you’ll never be caught out by an audit again.
What metrics should you track?
Once you have your accident prevention strategies in place, how can you track if they are effective or not? Knowing your leading safety indicators can help. Leading safety indicators are the proactive steps you take to prevent accidents before they occur, for example hazard spotting or safety audits. Tracking these will help you to assess the impact of your accident prevention and will highlight where improvements still need to be made.
For example, has the rate of hazard reporting increased over a period of time and have you seen the accident rate change as a result? Are you conducting audits frequently enough or are there gaps in your safety data? Do employees need more training or do your teams feel comfortable and confident about their safety responsibilities? Tracking these metrics will help you build a more accurate picture of your overall safety management and enable you to improve your accident prevention over time.
Final thoughts and key takeaways
An effective accident prevention strategy is one that everyone in your organisation feels empowered and confident to contribute to. It requires input and engagement from across your team and should evolve over time to exemplify the very best health and safety practice across your workplace. Accident prevention reduces the financial, reputational and human costs to your business, and is a fundamental part of your every day health and safety management.
Making use of digital tools like Notify’s incident reporting software and mobile apps can ensure accidents are reported and escalated promptly. With immediate notifications for high priority incidents such as an accident, you can quickly assign actions and mitigate any further risk. Interested to see how you can proactively reduce the likelihood of accidents? Get in touch to book a safety software demo and see how Notify can help today.