Accidents happen, even though we beat the safety drum ad infinitum. So is THAT the problem?
Just over a week ago, I found myself on a flight bound for Helsinki. After we had gone through the traditional commercial air travel rigmarole of arguing about who should be sat where while others insisted that a suitcase large enough to house a small giraffe constituted carry-on baggage, we settled back to listen to the usual safety instructions.
I have been flying for business on a pretty regular basis for just over a quarter of a century now and, to be honest, these safety instructions now waft over me like muzak in an elevator, leaving no discernible impression upon me whatsoever. In fact, aside from the usual mention of a light and a whistle on the life-jacket apparently stowed under my seat, I remember virtually nothing of those instructions except that the air hostess was, perhaps, a little past her sell-by date (aren’t we all…?) and that her pronouncements were standing between me and the next episode of The Sopranos on my iPad.
What has all this got to do with demolition, I hear you ask?
Well just think about the health and safety messages that workers in this industry are exposed to over the course of a year. In the space of my journalistic career, I reckon I have endured airline safety instructions around 500 times over a 25 year period. It is not unthinkable that a demolition worker could have racked up that same level of “safety exposure” in just a couple of years. And if I am jaded by an exposure that now occurs just a few times per month, imagine how that demolition worker must feel sitting through his 15th asbestos awareness toolbox talk of the year.
I am not suggesting for one moment that we reduce this safety exposure. Far from it, in fact. But are we not in danger of repeating ourselves so often that any underlying message is merely lost as legislative muzak?
Here in the UK, the run-up to the Christmas party season only begins officially when the Government announces its latest hard-hitting (and for hard-hitting, read gruesome) new anti drink-driving TV advertising campaign. The messages contained within these ads fluctuates between the subtle (don’t allow your friends to drive when over the legal limit) to the stark images of bodies being hauled from wrecked cars, and distraught families gathered at rain-sodden gravesides.
But the key point here is that while the message remains the same – don’t drink and drive – the method of delivery is constantly changing.
Sadly, people do still drink and drive; bodies are still dragged out of overturned cars; families do still grieve for lost loved ones killed directly or indirectly by drink driving. But if by varying the message just one person thinks again about that additional drink, then the campaign has surely been worthwhile.
Of course, the core content of health and safety training courses delivered here in the UK and elsewhere is controlled as part of a wider learning curriculum, so it would be virtually impossible to turn tried and tested methods on their heads. But the onus is upon trainers and instructors to use everything at their disposal to ensure that their audience is fully engaged at all times.
And if a person in the front row of a safety briefing stares at you unblinking for several minutes, the chances are that he is not captivated by your stage presence or rapt at your mastery of PowerPoint; he has, more likely, succumbed to safety fatigue.
