Day 084 - 07 Feb 95 - Page 39
1 Q. Right, but what about non-reportable accidents?
2 A. It is a little difficult to say, because each store
3 keeps a record of those in its own accident book. The
4 figures, I am not aware that they are ever collated
5 throughout the company, that each accident book is gone
6 through and some sort of tally made of these accidents.
7
8 Q. You never make checks then on how frequent accidents are
9 occurring in stores?
10 A. We have reportable accidents and the accident book for
11 each restaurant is checked under a number of audit
12 producers.
13
14 Q. Checked by who?
15 A. They would be checked by the health and safety
16 department, the regional health and safety officers that go
17 out and check it. It will also be checked by the
18 restaurant supervisors when they are doing any audits and
19 under our full field unannounced visits which happen once
20 per year in each restaurant.
21
22 Q. So you expect the stores to keep the accident books
23 available for your inspection at all times, or do you
24 actually tell them when you are coming to look at it or
25 what?
26 A. No. The regional safety and officers will go round and
27 generally visit stores unannounced just to do a check, so
28 they are available at any time for anyone to go in and have
29 a look at. Indeed, environmental health officers often
30 check them when they go into the restaurants as well. It
31 is a readily available book. It has to be because he crew
32 member has to be able to find it quickly to enter the
33 details in when they have had an accident.
34
35 Q. Then so does head office ever kind of analyse what sort of
36 accidents are occurring the most frequently of the
37 non-reportable type or not at all?
38 A. I think it is a case of prioritising our time. The
39 accidents that cause us most concern are the more serious
40 accidents, so that is where we tend to spend our time
41 looking within the daily accident book. You may just
42 slightly cut your finger and it will go in there or a minor
43 burn may go in there. It is important to us, but we
44 prioritise the major accidents as things that we think we
45 should look at. I think the effort of collating all these
46 blue books throughout the country to find out whether a
47 burn or a cut finger was the most frequent would not be a
48 good use of our time; it would be better concentrating on
49 the areas that cause more severe accidents. It is a
50 current to us, but it is less of a priority.
51
52 Q. But a large number of more minor accidents might point to
53 something being wrong which could be something that leads
54 to a major accident?
55 A. I am having difficulty visualising a case like that.
56 If you think about a burn, we have things that are hot in
57 the restaurants and on occasions someone will touch that
58 and cause a minor burn. We know that there is a
59 possibility of a more serious burn, but that is covered in
60 our training and our prioritisation of the other accidents.
