Prevention reduces number of serious accidents

Sodexo’s basic attitude is that no one should be injured at work. But unfortunately, sometimes people do get hurt. At Sodexo, serious accidents where one of our employees needs to take sick leave due to something that has happened in the workplace are referred to as Lost Time Injuries, LTIs.

We are working really hard to reduce the number of LTIs. The most important thing is to be proactive and maintain a preventive approach. We are working very actively on risk assessments, which are one piece of the puzzle. A risk assessment is an attempt to identify and evaluate potential risks so that actions can be put in place to ensure that these risks don´t result in accidents.

The use of chemical products is one area that can come across as hard to assess in terms of risk. We have introduced a new tool during the year in the form of a chemicals management system known as Chemsoft.

This system includes:

• Lists of chemicals

• Current safety data sheets

• Rules related to different chemical products

• Risk assessments of our chemical hazards

“Our Chemsoft tool is helping all our organisations to keep track of the risks posed by our use of chemicals. Moreover, the system supports us in fulfilling the documentation requirements for chemicals,” says Sofia Eleftheriadis, HSE Manager.

This is how LTIs have developed in recent years. The graph shows the number of LTIs in relation to the number of hours worked.