Navigating Safe Surfaces: Your Role in Preventing Slips, Trips, and Falls

From the worker's perspective, WorkCover Queensland emphasizes the critical role of floor and ground surfaces in preventing slips, trips, and falls by ensuring their suitability for tasks, potential contaminants, and the people using the area.

Considerations include:

  • Recognizing that improper flooring material and design choices can significantly increase the risk of slips, trips, and falls.
  • Understanding how smooth hard surfaces elevate slip risks, contaminants on the floor further increase the risk, incorrect cleaning methods can make floors more slippery, and changes in flooring height can cause trips.
  • Acknowledging that slips, trips, and falls can occur between areas with different types of flooring materials, and a floor that is slip-resistant when dry may not be slip-resistant when wet.
  • Highlighting the effectiveness of floor roughness in reducing slips compared to slip-resistant footwear.
  • Emphasizing essential factors to check for in existing flooring, including uneven or poor condition surfaces, worn or damaged anti-slip paint, profiles, or tape, and areas of slipperiness under normal conditions.
  • Recognizing that flooring may have been originally chosen for a different purpose, making it unsuitable for its current use.
  • Understanding that objective measures of floor slipperiness, such as certified methods outlined in relevant Australian Standards and other testing methods, can provide insights into the relative slipperiness of surfaces under different conditions.
  • Emphasizing the importance of a risk management approach in assessing slip resistance, considering various factors like floor surface type, contaminants, work tasks, cleaning methods, footwear, activity, and environmental conditions.
  • Encouraging the selection of the most appropriate flooring, considering expected use conditions and users, grip in wet and dry conditions, materials suitable for tasks and typical wear, cleaning requirements, and consistent floor heights and surfaces.
  • Promoting ongoing maintenance, including repairing or replacing surfaces, maintaining slip resistance with the right cleaning methods, fixing changes in heights, repairing torn carpet or broken concrete, highlighting surface changes with contrast colors or strips, removing loose matting, and improving slip resistance with surface treatments if required.

Improving slip resistance of existing flooring/surfacing

These are possible options for improving the slip resistance of existing flooring and surfaces:

Treatment type

Typical application for use

Adhesive strips

Applicable to all flooring types. Mineral-coated adhesive strips are useful for localised slip hazards such as stair treads and ramps. However, they wear quickly and should be considered as a temporary solution or receive regular replacement

Coatings

Applicable to concrete, clay pavers, steel plate and timber. A range of base materials is used including acrylics, flexible polymers, polyester resin, vinyl ester resin and epoxy resin. For the best slip resistance the coatings include some aggregate such as rubber particles, silica sands and silicon carbide granules. These treatments can be tailored to the application depending on the level of chemical, traffic or slip resistance needed. With the right aggregate, slip resistance under oily conditions is quite feasible

Grinding

Applicable to concrete, ceramic tiles, granite, marble, terrazzo and clay pavers. This treatment can give a rougher surface, so it can be used to give slip resistance under oily conditions

Grooving with diamond saw

Applicable to concrete, ceramic tiles, granite, marble, terrazzo and clay pavers. For example, grooves 2–3 mm deep, spaces at 7–10 mm would give slip resistance under oily conditions. Loss of the sealed surface could lead to staining

Proprietary treatments such as a mild etch

Applicable to ceramic tiles, granite, terrazzo, clay pavers and vinyl. They may increase slip resistance but the tile may still be too slippery, particularly for soapy water. The treatment would be ineffective for oily conditions. The effectiveness has also been found to deteriorate after a few months, requiring repeated applications

Sand blasting

Applicable to concrete, ceramic tiles, granite, marble, terrazzo, clay pavers and steel plate. Oil can still make the surface slippery

Strong acid etches

Applicable to concrete. Should make it suitable for slip resistance with water but not with oil




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