A recent study of an Irish retail food organisation with a pro-active health and safety culture found that of some 900 staff employed in three stores, 110 staff had accidents over a 20-month period. That is the equivalent of one in eight workers.

With 115 customer accidents over the same period, and some 25,000 customers a week visiting just one of the three outlets studied, the probability of a customer being involved in an accident was considerably less, at only one in 550.

Ms Sara Boyd, who has been researching accident frequency and costs in the retail food sector in Ireland at the Dublin Institute of Technology for the past two years, stresses that her industrial partner, an Irish retail food organisation, has an excellent and "very pro-active" approach to health and safety.

She told The Irish Times: "I found that 33 per cent of staff accidents were related to slip injuries, 32 per cent were cut injuries, followed by 22 per cent impact injuries."

Some 35 per cent of reported accidents, including those involving customers, received first aid - 42 per cent of staff accidents received first aid compared to 27 per cent of customer accidents. Staff are exposed to higher risks than customers within a supermarket. They're in the store for longer and are exposed to risks posed, for instance, by forklift trucks and automatic meat slicers. Customers' accidents are at the shop floor level, with impact injuries like pulling goods down on top of themselves, collisions with trolleys and slipping injuries predominating. In 29 per cent of all reported accidents, the injured person was either taken to hospital, treated at the scene by a doctor or sought medical attention within a week of the accident. Some 41 per cent of staff accidents required medical attention. The organisation has "a very good staff care system in place so, as you can see, staff are not neglected when they did have an accident", she says.

The study looked closely at the cost of accidents. Ms Boyd collected the outlets' accident data and examined how accidents to staff and customers were recorded. She noted that there was nothing on the accident report form to record accident costs and amended the form to include direct and indirect costs.

She found that over the 20-month period, on one analysis, accidents in the three outlets cost the company £22,850 (€29,013), of which £4,160 were direct costs and £18,690 indirect. "What I had looked at were direct and indirect costs. And I had found a ratio of 1:4.5 direct to indirect costs."

Companies are aware of direct costs, such as the cost of labour: "paid for no production" and "staff at home unable to do any work through injury or sickness". But indirect costs "are additional costs incurred to achieve desired output, for example, payment of overtime, repair costs, perhaps a gesture of goodwill made to the injured customer, time spent investigating the accident and maybe rescheduling work", she says.

It's a large company and "£22,850 over nearly a period of two years, you think, well, it's not actually an awful lot of money. So there is the question that can be raised: are accident costs a good basis for implementing safety management?" But she cautions: "I must stress here the costs I have calculated do not include legal long-term civil liability or any compensation costs."

She calculated that 2 per cent of the total company work time was lost due to accidents, with most of it lost by injured staff members who had to take anything from an hour to perhaps six weeks off work due to an accident.

She also found that 54 per cent of staff accidents occurred within the first three years of service in the company and "28 per cent of accidents involved people who were in the company just within their first year".

"You must remember as well that these are all reported accidents. It is possible that maybe staff were involved in accidents and they weren't reported or maybe customers were involved in minor accidents and they didn't report it."

Ms Boyd's study, which should be of interest to anyone in the retail trade, can be read in full in the September issue of Health & Safety Review*. It gives the breakdown of customer and staff accidents, the places and departments they occur, the severity of the accidents, and the length of service of staff involved in accidents.

* Published by IRN, Ranelagh, Dublin 6. Tel: 01 497 2711.