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.