Or ‘Was the weather nice?’, or, my favourite, ‘Have a nice time did you?’
If you’ve heard one of these phrases, and you haven’t recently returned from a fortnight in the Seychelles, you’ve probably wanted to wish pestilence on the person who said it. It’s happened to us all. It happened to me recently, in a shopping centre. It will happen to you again. It’s the third certainty of life, along with death and taxes.
The dreaded trip.
That horrible moment when you realise that you have misjudged the height or, in my case, the presence of a step and rather than your foot meeting a solid surface it meets air or it meets the lip of the step you should be standing on. Time slows, just enough for you to appreciate the faces watching you. Take a good look. There will be teenagers and an attractive member of the opposite sex. There always is. Your brain whirs into action as it tries to compute the best way of keeping you upright. It took billions of years of evolution to get us walking on two feet. But you, you’ve managed to undo that in seconds. You are taking an evolutionary step back in time, my friend. You are going down. You will walk on all fours again.
If you are lucky, you might not fall. You might just do a forward stumble, and like some Charleston dancer, your feet will start to move double time as they try to catch the rest of your body. You might just make it. If that is the case, well done to you. Great recovery. You have another problem now: whether to look around you and stare angrily at the offending step, or whether you pretend nothing has happened. Most people go for the second option, often accompanied with what’s known as the ‘speed up’. Yep, if you trip, but don’t quite fall, the best thing to do is speed up. This helps (a) give the impression that you are in a serious rush, hence the reason why you tripped in the first place (b) it gets you away from the sniggering teenagers as quickly as possible. Have a look at the video below, to see what I mean. How many people look back at what they tripped on? I counted one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-22FjgoE4
There is a serious side though. Did you know that over 10,000 people suffer a major injury as a result of a slip or a trip in workplaces each year? Or that the latest HSE statistics (below) show that around 1,000,000 workers reported a slip or a trip in the workplace last year (Graph from http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causinj/kinds-of-accident.htm)
Here at HSL, we have a whole team dedicated to undertaking research and helping to reduce the risks of slipping, tripping and falling. Much of the work that the team has undertaken has been done for HSE and has resulted in freely-available guidance and toolkits such as those found here (http://www.hse.gov.uk/shatteredlives/tools.htm). Some of it has been undertaken for other customers who are experiencing high numbers of accidents and who want help in trying to understand why.
Some of the work the team has undertaken over the last few years has had a major impact on the way in which organisations minimise their risks. From helping to develop technical guidance for hospital flooring, to advising on which footwear is appropriate for different environments (one anti-slip shoe might be great on an oil-rig, but hopeless in a bakery environment), the team are undertaking research which is helping to prevent accidents and save lives.
Their research involves aspects you perhaps wouldn’t think about when talking about slipping, tripping or falling and, like most of the work at HSL, it needs an appreciation of human factors. Reducing accidents and fatalities through slips, trips and falls is about choosing the right flooring and footwear for the right environment. But it’s also about using the right cleaning regime, it’s about understanding human behaviour. It’s about signage, lighting, the impact of weather. It’s about safety culture, workplace layout and using common sense in the design of the work environment.
Getting the right information is critical if you want to prevent slips, trips and falls (and you can prevent them). The team have developed two training courses:
- A one-day course on slips, trips and falls
- A half-day course on assessing stair falls risk, this includes some simple tools developed by HSL for assessing stairs.
If you want to get in touch with the team, you can find two key members on LinkedIn (Rob Shaw and Kevin Hallas).
In the meantime, if you do happen to trip up, just remember, it really can happen to anyone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixSd3DVcjY
Views from the top of a hill 