Getting hands-on for safety

Many people take their hands and fingers for granted, but can you imagine doing your work or the things you enjoy without them? What about tying your shoelaces or peeling a banana?

These are some of the activities which took place across RTCA recently to help reduce the number of injuries occurring on site to hands and fingers.

General manager – Health, Safety and Environment Rory Gordon said that there has been an increased number of hand injuries across RTCA and it was time to bring the operational teams together to talk about hand safety.

“Across the business more than 50 per cent of our injuries involve hands or fingers, a trend which is also reflected across the wider Rio Tinto Group,” Rory said.

“In September Rio Tinto’s Rossing Uranium site in Namibia took the first step and brought its team together to help find out why the injuries were happening, and what it could do to remove the risks and implement controls for the future.

“We decided to adopt a similar approach, bringing our workforce together on each site to run a series of workshops and activities including Hunter Valley Operations where employees were asked to peel a banana or tie up shoelaces with only one hand.

“Getting the crews together helped us to reinforce how important our hands are, and also find out if there are specific tasks or activities we do everyday which have the potential to harm hands or fingers.

“We came up with a number of solutions including displaying posters across our sites to ensure people use the right type of gloves to suit the task required, as well as thinking outside the square when completing Take 5s to focus on hand-specific risks.

“We want to leave work as happy and healthy as when we arrived, and sometimes we just need to be reminded not to take safety for granted. I am pleased to see everyone getting involved to help us stop these sorts of injuries taking place at RTCA.”