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DANGER? Fatigue significantly increases the risk of incident when not effectively controlled. Karl Simons, chief health, safety and security officer at Thames Water, explains why organisations need to take fatigue management seriously.
Q
What prompted Thames Water to look at the risks posed by fatigue?
We were always looking at the psychological impact mental health and state of mind can have on concentration levels, which can lead to slips and lapses in concentration and judgement, and ultimately end up in incidents and injuries. Errors often arise because someone is not focused on the task at hand, because of worry, tiredness or exhaustion.
Q
What is the industry picture?
Businesses have changed their practices governing the control of working hours to prevent excessive fatigue. The Working Time Directive 2003 tells us that companies must have shift patterns in place to keep working hours to an average of 48 hours per week over a 17-week period and ensure more stringent controls for night shift and vulnerable workers. As working hours are generally implemented with a great deal of thought and approval, businesses keep within the rules.
However, there are hidden risks and the key to understanding this is first to ask the right questions. For example, when did you last run a check on overtime hours from a health and safety perspective, not a cost control measure? There are a number of routes a company can take – including vehicle telematics, reviewing work scheduling devices and sifting through clock-on/clock-off cards – to understand its exposure to fatigue risk, however some of these can provide an inaccurate picture, for example someone might forget to clock off a device and this leads to a false sense of risk control. Arguably the best mechanism for understanding exposure to fatigue risk is setting robust working hours or shift pattern control and then analysing the overtime hours worked in a department or a company.
Q
What is the position of the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) on fatigue?
The HSE has undertaken extensive fatigue management research; this tells us that the risk of incident can escalate as
fatigue levels increase, which may have devastating consequences. Controls need to be implemented because of the risk escalating in such an extraordinary manner, the HSE insists. Shift patterns are a simple starting point for asking the right question: for example “How many of our people are working in excess of 12 hours in a 24-hour period?” When you start to ask that question, you can start to put in controls. From what I’ve seen, the water industry collectively has been very good at asking this question, understanding the fatigue risk and implementing controls.
Q
Are there any warning signs employers should be looking out for of employees potentially putting themselves at risk?
There are two ends of the scale. Some employees will speak up and say, ‘I’ve been working hard all week, I am really tired’ and then at the other end of the scale some will say, ‘I worked 16 hours yesterday and 80 hours this week.’ This sort of bravado
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