Part of FAME’s Health & Safety strategy is to assemble industry injury and accident data to allow organisations to benchmark their performance against the sector. We hope this data will provide a better picture of Health and Safety across our sector and may assist with the development of preventative measures and improved ways of working.

Report:

FAME Health and Safety Injury Survey 2018-19

Headlines:

At first glance. archaeology appears to have a high RIDDOR injury rates. However, archaeology is a small field compared to other sectors which means one or two injuries can dramatically change the sectors ranking. Two archaeologists carrying a bulky piece of equipment together tripping and hurting themselves can easily change the rate for the whole sector significantly. We will need to average together several year’s data to be able to estimate the rates accurately and with precision. We appear to be similar in most aspects to the construction of buildings occupations which makes sense as they share work environments sometimes.

Of greater concern are non-RIDDOR reportabel injuries. For an injury to be RIDDOR reportable it has to be the result of a separate, identifiable, unintended incident, which causes physical injury. So, an injury or illness resulting in time off work is not reportable unless there is an identifiable event that caused the injury, for example, an object striking someone. Muscle injuries can be cumulative and repetitive stress injuries would also not be caught by RIDDOR reporting as they are not caused by a single event. In future surveys we will aim to collect better data on the non-RIDDOR reported injuries to better understand this.

FAME’s Health and Safety Working Group are concerned by these numbers. While we are comparable to those working in the construction of buildings we believe that is still too high for the work we do. FAME is currently sourcing training for manual handling and ergonomics for members to help lower these injury rates. We hope to have more information about this training soon.