This is not the fall season, but it is a season for falls.

As spring has sprung in most parts of the Northern Hemisphere, this can often be a peak time for construction crews to be on the job. Building, renovating, repairing, expanding are all part of construction during the springtime. And as is well-documented already, construction is one of the most dangerous industries for workers. While much progress has been made in better ensuring safety and health of construction workers, incidents and deaths do still occur. And one of the most common causes of incidents, injuries and deaths is a fall from a higher elevation such as from a ladder or scaffolding or off a roof.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user ed ed via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user ed ed via a Creative Commons license]

For most companies and worksite foremen, it is one thing to prevent falling, but it can be completely different when the topic moves to fall protection. It is noble to have a goal to eventually have zero falls on a worksite, but often that can be very unrealistic. So when you can’t actually prevent every fall (even with the best of efforts), the next best thing you can do is implement some form of fall-protection plan that can help all your workers mitigate the damage from a fall.

But do you have a good fall-protection plan in place? Might you be getting it confused with a fall-prevention plan?

Think about it: Having a guardrail is a fall-prevention measure; that guardrail doesn’t provide much protection when a fall is already occurring.

Our friends at OHS Insider have implemented a template worksheet that can be downloaded and printed to ask valuable questions that will help a company implement a fall protection plan for a worksite.

What Makes a Good Fall Protection Plan?

When developing a fall-protection plan for your workers – no matter what their work is or were they are working – you have to consider several factors and ask some tough questions in order to crystallize a plan. But if you want to put in a good plan and not just any plan, then your fall-protection plan should have all of these six areas covered:

  1. Understanding of all the fall hazards on a worksite.
  2. Knowledge of the fall protection systems that will be used (being as specific as possible).
  3. Anchors that are or will be used. (Again, specifics – even the distance of the anchor from the worker, the type of anchor and where it will be located, etc.)
  4. Knowledge of the clearances below the worker. (How far woudl the fall be? Are there objects under the worker?)
  5. Have procedures to inspect, use, assemble and disassemble the fall-protection systems that will be used.
  6. If the fall-protection system fails, what is the rescue procedure?

The worksheet that you can use requests as much detail as possible in regards to each of these items, asking for actual observance and not just healthy estimates. And when it comes to resues, workers are encouraged to be train in proper procedures, and supervisors are asked to detail the procedures with as much specificity as psosible so an assessment of the procedure can be determined. (Is the rescue equipment appropriate for the situation? What other device or procedure could be used that is more effective? Etc.)

I would be the first to admit that it can be impossible to actually prevent falls from happening in certain worksite environments. But to give up and accept that people will get injured from falls is not the wisest plan. There are way to protect a worker from a fall causing injury or death, as many injuries and deaths are not instantaneous the moment a worker falls. It is always the impact at the end of the fall that matters. So if you can’t keep a fall from happening, you could and should put in place procedures and tools to prevent the impact of a fall.

That alone can save many lives. But you can’t just do it in a bubble; it has to be part of a broader plan that protects all workers from any fall, no matter where the fall occurs or what work a worker is doing at the time. Call it a Plan B in fall prevention. For more information or to downoad the fall-portection plan worksheet, check out the OHS Insider website.