FOUNDARY INDUSTRY TAKES INITIATIVE TO IMPROVE SAFETY AT WORK

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FOUNDARY INDUSTRY TAKES INITIATIVE TO IMPROVE SAFETY AT WORK
09 July 2003 - HSE InfoLine

Bill Callaghan, Chair of the Health and Safety Commission today launched SHIFT, an industry initiative to improve safety and health in foundries at the National Metalforming Centre in Birmingham.

SHIFT will help companies control the risks to the health and safety of their employees and has the objective of reducing accidents by up to 30% over five years.

Each year at least 25 employees in every 1,000 within the foundry industry suffers an injury, which prevents them from working for at least three days. That rate is over twice the average for manufacturing and four times that of UK workforce as a whole.

In launching SHIFT Bill Callaghan Chair of the Health & Safety Commission, said the he was please to be invited to inaugurate the initiative.

"SHIFT is an excellent example of how the industry is working together to improve its health and safety performance. Employers, employees, unions, federations and companies; a partnership approach will carry us a long way towards the improvements we seek."

"The foundry industry has come up with this initiative as a way of sharing health and safety knowledge between companies and providing individual companies a platform to commit to achieving improved health and safety targets in their own workplaces. If each company reaches their targets, then together the industry will reduce the current rate of injury and ill-health in foundries in Great Britain."

SHIFT includes a two-pronged attack on the accident performance of the industry. First the HSC's Foundries Industry Advisory Committee have produced information, guidance and management tools to control the key health and safety hazards in the foundry industry.

Secondly, individual organisations and employers today committed themselves to a programme of action to address the risks within their business and reduce the overall injury rate by 30% over the next five years.

The launch included a presentation describing the details of the initiative and Bill Callaghan presented foundry companies that are signing up to the initiative with a certificate of commitment.

So far over 70 foundries companies have publicly committed themselves to the initiative plus organisations representing employers and employees.

http://www.hse.gov.uk

About: HSE InfoLine
Britain's Health and Safety Commission (HSC) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) are responsible for the regulation of almost all the risks to health and safety arising from work activity in Britain.

The HSE looks after health and safety in nuclear installations and mines, factories, farms, hospitals and schools, offshore gas and oil installations, the safety of the gas grid and the movement of dangerous goods and substances, railway safety, and many other aspects of the protection both of workers and the public. Local authorities are responsible to HSC for enforcement in offices, shops and other parts of the services sector.

The HSC is sponsored by the Department of Work and Pensions and is ultimately accountable to the Minister of State for Work, the Right Honourable Jane Kennedy MP.

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