Follow the continuous reduction of HAV
The HSE continuous reduction process is quite clear on how to assess and mitigate risks but there are many companies who still fail to either apply or maintain this requirement. From working with hundreds of companies the following 4 reasons have consistently arisen that stops companies from being HSE compliant and protecting worker welfare.
The Reactec Analytics Platform addresses all these issues to either remove or reduce the barriers for companies to more easily and effectively comply with HSE regulations and reduce HAV risks. Even though there is no legal requirement for continual monitoring and recording of vibration exposure the HSE agree that digital monitoring “can be a useful tool for carrying out a risk assessment or for monitoring the preventive measures in place to ensure that they are effective”.
1. Maintaining awareness of an invisible risk
Keeping everyone aware of the dangers, responsibility and involvement of HAV mitigation activity is time consuming and HAVS is seen as an invisible risk and one of just many issues to be addressed.
Many people think HAVS is a hidden danger but the Reactec Analytics Platform makes HAVs risks visible by monitoring individual and collective exposure, the source of exposure (to help support actions to reduce risk) and readily highlights the effectiveness of actions taken. The system calculates and displays in real-time, HSE points and action value thresholds. These indicators not only maintain awareness but help to educate workers of their exposure risk in relation to tool use and to ensure responsibility is taken by all parties for their welfare.The displayed point encourages operators to become pro-active and engaged, actively looking for tool orjob rotation. and to aid better planning of shits.
The Reactec Analytics reports are created automatically and easily distributed to all duty holders providing wider and easier access to information. This helps increase awareness throughout a company of the measure of controls and activities to revise them.
The simple and concise reports help employers understand HAV risk and how to better manage them both reactively to daily occurrence and proactively to overall trends. They also demonstrate that a company values the importance of worker welfare and team work.
2. Assessment of representative risk
The HSE state a manual assessment carried out using best practise will have a high level of uncertainty and employees are also unlikely to be able to provide this information very accurately themselves. All of this uncertainty can influence actions to reduce risk as well as measure their effectiveness at a later date.
The HSE state a digital monitoring system helps quantify exposure assessment especially across multiple or complex work projects. RAP removes the uncertainty of tool use by tracking accurately trigger time and tools used by which operators.
RAP also measures the variation of tool vibration magnitude across work schedules and operator tool use to help identify how representative the risk is plus poor tool performance and utilisation.
3. How to ensure controls are being followed.
Once controls are put in place it can be difficult to ensure they are being followed correctly. By simply monitoring work and tool activity many controls can be deployed and supported more effectively.
The Reactec Analytics reports allow managers and team leaders to see if the measure of controls are being adhered too This can include tool use and rotation to work schedules and tool deployment.
4. Limited ability to measure the results of risk reduction activity to aid continuous reduction
Measuring effectiveness of controls is straight forward when continuously monitoring HAVs exposure before and after the control is put in place. No matter the control whether it is changing shift patterns, work schedules, tool choices ultimately overall vibration exposure needs to be reduced with effective controls.
The HSE state a digital monitoring system helps audit the success of planned controls.. The Reactec Analytics Platform helps you more easily and accurately measure the outcome of actions to mitigate exposure risks. The Reactec Analytics Platform helps companies not just more easily and effectively manage HAV risks across all projects, departments and individuals but to design out exposure at all stages of a project from initial design and planning to development and delivery.
By accurately measuring vibration and exposure trends across work activities, the effectiveness of an action plan can be more confidently reviewed to support changes that are accountable.
