- Published 28 May 2024
- Last Modified 28 May 2024
- 7 min
Workplace Trip Hazards and Their Prevention
Trip hazards are a serious workplace safety issue, with too many counted in the UK every year. Learn about different trip hazards and how to avoid them here.
Reviewed by David Carmichael, Solution Engineer (May 2024)
Trip hazards in the workplace are an ongoing serious issue facing businesses and workers. These hazards take many forms and can be difficult to spot and manage. With the right practices and controls in place, though, you can ensure that workers and visitors can move freely and safely around your workplace.
Trip Hazard Examples
So just what is a trip hazard? It is any change in height in someone’s path that could cause them to lose their balance. This can take the form of obstructions or changes in floor elevation. There is not actually a minimum specified HSE trip hazard height, though obstructions taller than 1 inch (25.4 mm) are generally considered trip hazards.
Trip hazard examples in the workplace include:
- Boxes or objects left carelessly in walkways
- Cables or hoses suspended above ground level
- Damaged stairway steps, or ones with inconsistent or insufficient heights
- Open drawers or cabinets
- Uneven ground
- Single steps
- Poor lighting or obstructed sightlines
Some of these may seem benign, and while they can be easily marked or removed, failure to do so leaves the risk of a fall injury and all the associated costs and reputational harm to your business.
Workplace Trip Injuries in the UK
Workplace Trip Injuries Statistics
The Health and Safety Executive’s 2022/23 statistics illustrate the prevalence of trip hazards in the workplace. Slips, trips, and falls on the same level (that is, not falling from an elevated height) were the most common cause of employee-reported non-fatal workplace injuries, accounting for 179,520 out of the 561,000 total (32%).
Employees in various industries reported high levels of injuries (from all causes, not just trips) in this period. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing came in the highest, followed closely by construction, accommodation/food services, wholesale/retail trade, transportation/storage, and others. This affirms that protection from dangers like trip hazards is vitally important for all workers, regardless of their industry.
Safety Standards for Trip Hazards
Managing trip hazards in the workplace falls within the following safety standards in the UK.
Section 12 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations of 1992 governs employer responsibilities concerning trip hazards. It mandates that workplace flooring and traffic routes be:
- Built appropriately for their purpose
- Free of obstructions, substances, slopes, and holes that could cause slips, trips, or falls
- Not uneven or slippery in a way that could cause slips, trips, or falls
- Built with effective drainage, where necessary
More broadly, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations of 1999 set out employer obligations for assessing the health and safety risks, such as trip hazards, that their operations expose workers and other individuals to.
Finally, slip-resistant footwear used as PPE against trip hazards must meet EN ISO 20345 slip resistance standards.
Costs of Trip Injuries
When a fall injury happens in the workplace due to a trip hazard, there can be staggering costs (as with all workplace injuries). These include both financial costs and human costs.
Financial costs are monetary losses the victim, the business, and even society suffer:
- Lost income
- Stopped or reduced production
- Training replacement workers
- Investigation and litigation
- Fines
Human costs are more difficult to quantify but can be even more significant, ranging from injury to a business' reputational damage.
HSE statistics indicate that from 2019/20 to 2022/23, 606,000 workers were injured yearly on average. For the 2021/22 period, injuries cost individuals, businesses, and the government £7.7 billion, with individuals seeing the majority of that. These numbers alone are reason enough to adopt strong practices for preventing trip accidents.
Trip Hazard Prevention
As with all safety hazards, addressing trip hazards in the workplace involves a range of measures: hazard elimination, risk reduction, and training. A detailed risk assessment can help you identify the nature and severity of your trip hazards and the best measures for addressing them.
Eliminating Hazards
Removing hazards completely is always the best approach since it eliminates the possibility of workplace injury due to tripping.
- Lighting: Set up additional or stronger lights if the current ones are noticeably insufficient for spotting objects
- Sightlines: If your equipment’s arrangement on the shop floor makes it difficult to see hazards when rounding corners, then rearrange it into a more comfortable, free-flowing layout
- Stairs: If steps are damaged or have uneven heights, see to their repair or complete replacement
These measures require substantial investment, but they go a long way towards fall prevention by cutting out trip hazards.
Engineering Controls
Engineering controls are methods that prevent workers from contacting hazards, though the hazards do remain. When it comes to trip hazards, engineering controls include:
- Stairways designed with consistent, adequate step heights
- Strict quality standards for floor surfaces and ground grading
- Complete guardrails installed next to knee-high equipment
- Drawers and cabinets that gradually self-close
- Treadplate guards installed over hoses and wires when routing them across walkways is unavoidable. These guards must have slopes and high visibility to prevent them from becoming trip hazards themselves
Administrative Controls
Administrative controls are practices that prevent safety incidents from occurring. These controls include training, written procedures, and signage. Administrative control examples for trip hazards in the workplace include:
- Placing trip hazard signs to warn workers of these dangers
- Installing high-visibility tape on single steps
- Training employees to avoid and even prevent trip hazards, such as by not creating cable trip hazards due to careless routing
- Assessing fall injury incidents to learn how to prevent them in the future
- Designing daily operational practices around avoiding hazards
All these practices will help with preventing trip accidents and improve site safety in general.
PPE
Personal protective equipment (PPE) is the last line of defence against workplace injury. For fall prevention, slip-resistant footwear is the main PPE control. It helps more so with slip hazards, but in any contact with a trip hazard, maintaining your stance with slip-resistant footwear will always help you avoid a fall injury. As with all PPE, this footwear can only be effective if it is worn properly, matched to the task and environment, and kept free of damage.
The UK safety standard for slip-resistant footwear is EN ISO 20345. It used to have SRA, SRB, and SRC subcategories based on the flooring rated, but the standard’s 2022 update eliminated those. All new safety footwear with the EN ISO 20345 label effectively meets the old SRA rating.
Our range of safety footwear includes anti-slip safety boots that meet EN ISO 20345 while also being rugged and comfortable.
Making a Safer Workplace Culture
The best way to avoid workplace injury is to maintain a thoroughly safe environment. This begins with demonstrating that the company leadership values safety, and continues through ongoing employee training, prominent signage explaining hazard severity, and encouraging teams to look out for each other. Workers in a safe workplace culture will diligently prevent trip hazards by instinctively knowing not to place obstacles in walkways, attempt to walk over pallets, or carelessly route hoses and wires.
We can help equip you with the footwear, safety signs, and flooring you need to allow safe movement around your facility.
