On 26th April 2019, the team from our Knottingley Training Centre were delighted to attend and support an initiative organised by our customer TOTAL. Every year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) marks World Day for Safety – and this year, celebrated 100 years of work to improve occupational health and safety.
TOTAL are huge supporters of the initiative, and from their Ferrybridge branch, they have run events supporting the various safety themes every year. We have supported these events for the past three years by providing experts for first aid demonstrations and confined space workshops.
This year, the theme of World Day for Safety was working safely at height, and we were delighted to be able to provide safety demonstrations throughout the day. The MRS team took some of the height safety equipment with them and demonstrated practical things everyone can do to keep themselves safe when working at height.
Working at Height Safety
Every year hundreds of working at height accidents and incidents are recorded. Falls from height are one of the biggest causes of workplace fatalities and major injuries in the UK. Over the last five years they accounted for an average of 40 fatal injuries per year (28% of the total) and of these, just under half were in the construction sector.
MRS Training & Rescue Knottingley has recently expanded and launched a new working at heights training facility, approved by the Global Wind Organisation (GWO). The GWO accreditation means that the new facilities can be used to train anyone working on wind turbines, as well as those from other height industries.
Our Knottingley training centre now offers a wide range of health and safety training – including:
- GWO Wind Turbine training and facilities
- Work at height rescue courses
- Tower and platform courses and facilities
- Confined space tunnels for practical training exercises
- A range of classroom training including first aid, firefighting, IOSH and GWO courses
Operations Manager, Billy Gundry says “We can now offer realistic training in a safe environment at our centre at Knottingley, where our facilities include a specially designed training tower which provides our clients with the most realistic scenarios possible. Internal and external ladders, hatches, rooftop anchor beams, handrails, slopes, gates and a range of internal furnishing enable our training to be bespoke and cover a wide range of work applications to meet the needs of customers from all industrial sectors’’.
