From schools to fire brigades and waste disposal: standardization makes an important contribution to the prevention of accidents and occupational diseases among some nine million people insured by the German Social Accident Insurance Institutions in around 590,000 public-sector entities and institutions.
The German social accident insurance system provides cover for employees and other groups of people in the event of accidents and cases of occupational disease. It comprises the German Social Accident Insurance Institutions for trade and industry and those for the public sector. The latter insure not only public-sector employees, but also children in schools and daycare centres, students, volunteers and participants in social measures such as training programmes for job-seekers. For this very diverse group, Volume VII, Section 1 of the German Social Code (SGB) states that all suitable means must be used to assure the prevention of occupational accidents, occupational diseases and work-related health hazards. This is a challenging task, as the risks vary considerably according to the activity and occupational group concerned:
- Workers in waterworks and waste disposal face greater exposure to hazardous substances or biological risks.
- Workers in the police services, fire brigades, ambulance services and disaster relief face a high risk of accidents during deployments, and often suffer from mental stress.
- Teachers, childcare professionals and nursing staff are particularly exposed to risks of infection, noise and physical stress.
- Administrative staff frequently work at unergonomic VDU workstations.
- Schoolchildren and students are at risk of injury, for example during school sports or on their commute to and from their educational establishment.
Operational arrangements governing safety and health can be found in the national body of rules and regulations and those of the German Social Accident Insurance. Standardization is an effective means of reducing the various risks to insured persons presented by products, as it ensures that they are designed appropriately before they are even used in the workplace. The decisive factor here is that safety requirements are considered systematically during national, European and international standardization activity. At the same time, the standards must be consistent with German and European legislation and the German system of technical rules and regulations.
Real-case examples from a range of vocational and other areas of life show how standardization has already contributed successfully to preventive activity to the benefit of persons insured by the German Social Accident Insurance Institutions for the public sector:
- School bags: to ensure that children can be seen easily on their way to school, even in the dark, DIN 58124 requires that a certain proportion of a school bag’s surface area must be fitted with retroreflective and fluorescent materials.
- Office chairs: performing work whilst seated is not particularly conducive to good health. Poorly designed office chairs may even be dangerous, when they can tip over easily or are not rated for the weight of the user. EN 1335-2 therefore specifies how office chairs must be designed so as to keep the risk of injury to users as low as possible.
- Treatment tables: most people have, at some point, lain on a treatment table in a doctor’s surgery or physiotherapy practice. Hardly anyone, however, is aware that floor switches for electrical height adjustment have already caused serious and in some cases fatal accidents because cleaning staff or children have become trapped beneath the table. To prevent such accidents in the future by technical measures, beginning at the manufacturing stage, a harmonized European standard addressing the safety of medical treatment tables is currently being developed, based on the German DIN VDE V 0750-2-52-2 pre-standard.
- Protective clothing for firefighters: as an occupational group, firefighters are exposed to considerable hazards. Personal protective equipment is particularly important to ensure their safety and health. EN 469, for example, sets out performance requirements for protective clothing worn during fire brigade deployments. These concern the clothing’s resistance to heat and flames and its mechanical resistance, water-tightness, visibility and wear comfort.
- Refuse collection vehicles: refuse collection workers can, for example, fall off a vehicle when riding on the footboards, or be crushed when the vehicle is reversed and the driver’s field of view is impaired. The EN 1501 series of standards contains safety requirements intended to reduce these risks to a minimum. For example, as soon as a person is standing on the footboards, technical measures limit the vehicle’s maximum speed and prevent reversing.
- Forestry machinery: fatal accidents have occurred in the past involving workers or pedestrians being run over by forestry machinery such as timber harvesters or forwarders. For this reason, DIN 30767 was developed at the instigation and under the auspices of KAN. This standard specifies measurement methods for determining the field of view of persons sitting at the controls of self-propelled forestry machinery.
Standardization is an effective prevention instrument when it defines a high level of protection for products that are used at workplaces or in public establishments such as schools. Thanks to their expertise, the experts at the German Social Accident Insurance Institutions for the public sector play an indispensable part here: whether through active participation on standards committees, or as points of contact for KAN. KAN supports the work of the accident insurance institutions by issuing comments on standards that are agreed with all OSH stakeholders, and by using its influence to ensure that OSH concerns are taken into account.
Angela Janowitz
janowitz@kan.de
Corrado Mattiuzzo
mattiuzzo@kan.de
