Printing Equipment Safety Guidelines - Safety Measures in Handling Printing Equipment

 by: Carla Ballatan

Did you know for a fact that the Printing Industry has considerable standing in UK’s business and economy by being 6th largest industry in the country?

Yes! In fact, there are about 15,000 existing printing companies in the country with about 340,000 employed workers. Thus, considering its large labor force, tasks and the machineries involved in a printing company, accidents are, not surprisingly, frequent occurrences. Annually, printing companies come up with a report of about 1,350 work-related accidents and major injuries like fractures and amputations are results of about 200 of these types of accidents.

In order to have a clear view of how and why accidents occur – they were classified into three common types: manual handling; slips and trips and machinery accidents. Manual handling accidents represent about 1/3 of all the accidents reported by the printing and newspaper publishing industries. While, slips and trips accidents have a reported 341 slip and trip accidents where a significant number caused major injuries. Slips and trips represents over 25% of all the accidents by this sector of industry. The third and most common type of accident are machinery accidents in the printing and newspaper publishing industries and represents around 16% of all reported injuries. These accidents occur during setting up or cleaning down of printing presses or print finishing machinery.

In the printing industry, it is important to manage Machinery Safety in order to minimize accidents on machineries. These could be done by first identifying the problem areas in machines. After problem shooting decisions must be made on what to do and act on these decisions. Effective management of machinery safety means, that you troubleshoot and make sure that the following are done:

• Equipment is suitable for the use that it was intended for.

• Equipment is adequately maintained.

• Guards and protective devices are supplied and kept in good working order.

• Equipment whose safe operation is critically dependant on its condition in use and where deterioration would lead to a significant risk, are inspected at suitable intervals by a competent person.

• Adequate operator training and instructions are given.

Following the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 (PUWER) places general duties on employers to ensure that the work equipment they provide is suitable and safety for use. Practical improvements must be made especially on troublesome printing equipment identified. By this, accidents may be more lessened and workers would not have to risk too much in their performance.