147 WORKERS FATALLY INJURED

The latest statistics just released by the HSE show that in the year 2018 to 2019 147 workers were killed as a result of accidents at work.

The most common cause of fatal injury was falls from height accounting for 410 deaths, being struck by a moving vehicle resulted in 30 fatalities. Other common types of fatal accident included struck buy a moving object (16 deaths), contact with moving machinery (14) and trapped by something collapsing / overturning (11).

The number of fatal injuries at work has remained fairly level in recent years, over the last 5 years the annual average has been 142 deaths.

The most hazardous industry type was agriculture forestry and fishing with 32 fatalities a rate of 9.21 per 1000,000 workers in that industry sector. This was closely followed by the waste and recycling sector with 7 fatalities a rate of 6.05 per 1000,000 workers.

While some sectors had higher total numbers of fatal accidents (e.g. construction 30 deaths, Manufacturing 26) this in part reflects the larger numbers of people employed in these sectors. The overall rate of fatal injury in the construction sector being 1.31 per 100,000 workers and 0.92 per 100,000 in manufacturing.

The overall rate of fatal injury for all sectors was 0.45 per 100,000 workers which is the same as the longer term average from 2014 to 2019. This remains one of the lowest rates in the EU.

In addition there were 92 members of the public killed as a result of work related activities, just over a third of these (32) involved railways and another 23 were in the health and social work sector.

Full details of these statistics can be found on the HSE’s website at: http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals.htm