Image from RoadSafetyAtWork.ca
Planning for the safety of workers on the road is crucial for BC employers.
Road Safety Best Practices, Tools and Resources for your Workplace is a free workshop that helps employers with this planning.
Every year in BC, vehicle crashes kill an average of 22 workers and another 1,250 are injured. It’s the leading cause of traumatic workplace death, and in an effort to stop it, the Road Safety at Work campaign is reaching out to employers of people who drive while at work.
This includes those who drive as their main job activity and those who drive their own vehicles occasionally during a shift – often known as the grey fleet.
I contacted Angelina Robinson, the account manager for Road Safety At Work, to find out more about these ongoing workshops available by request.
“One-hundred percent of participants in the workshops to date have found that it expanded their thinking on road safety in the workplace and that they would recommend it to colleagues,” she said. “They are designed for employers, fleet and HR managers, supervisors, OHS practitioners and others responsible for keeping employees safe.”
The Trucking Safety Council of BC hosted a workshop at their Langley classroom on November 18.
“This partnership brings unlimited value to our clients and provides them with some excellent tools and resources to manage this important part of their business,” said John McMahon, TSCBC’s executive director. “The success of this workshop is only the start, and I can see us hosting many more in the future.”
To be in compliance, employers are required to
- Establish and maintain a health and safety program that addresses driver, trip, load and vehicle risk factors
- Ensure that workers have the safety information, instruction and training they need
- Support the safety activities of supervisors, workers and joint committees
- Remedy unsafe conditions and take action when informed of a hazardous situation
- Investigate workplace incidents; report serious accidents to WorkSafeBC
Angelina invites interested folks to visit the Road Safety at Work website or to email her to set up your own workshop. The workshop introduces planning and prevention tools that can be found on the website – including an “MVI cost calculator” that looks beyond the human costs of road tragedies.
Home care workers follow a schedule and quite often looking at the schedule during driving in order tot follow the times written out . As we are working in the night it is dark and even during the day it can be hazardous. This can be as dangerous as using cell phones which is also what happens we are often called while driving tfrom client to client. And we are dispatched 15 min to one client then the next one is 15 min. So the schedules need to be checked often
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