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Accident free artic
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Page 40
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The Royal Mail has taken accident management onto the streets with its 'Safety Concept Vehicle'. CM spent a day in it on a regular '252 trunk' to Swindon, keeping well out of harm's way.
, WeatherLey Its a fundamental fact of accident management that before you can even begin to tackle the problem, you've got to know exactly what's causing it. And that, in a nutshell, is the guiding principle behind the Royal Mail's (RM) Safety Concept Vehicle (SCV).
The background
Unveiled earlier this year (CM 21 May), the SCV has been specifically developed to help Royal Mail tackle at-work accidents, not least in key areas such as working at height — a recognised danger zone for any truck driver. Indeed, many of the 44 additional safety items fitted to the SCV are directly targeted at removing specific hazards, which leads us neatly back to the point about cause and effect.
However, rather than just approach the project like a small boy with a free pass to a sweet shop, and before deciding what equipment would be most beneficial, Royal Mail studied its own R1DDOR (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences regulations) data.
It placed particular emphasis on road traffic accidents and personal injuries and it found that 17% of all incidents involved falls from vehicles; 15% were related to injuries with roller shutters; 12% were slips and trips; while 7% were related to the coupling and uncoupling of artics.
Armed with those facts. RM then set about looking for practical accident prevention methods, working closely with us SCV partners DAF Trucks, which provided a CF85 6x2 tractor and Cartwright, which built the 16ft 2in high double-decker.
Alongside its SCV project, RM has been conducting an ongoing accident reduction programme based around team briefings, poster campaigns and pro-active mentoring through its driver trainers, However, rather than remaining an internal RM exercise, network operations director Phil Murphy is keen to use the SCV to spark a broader debate among all truck operators
-A lot of the issues we face are industry-wide ones. If this was a school report, as an industy, you could say we could do more towards addressing them."
On the road
CM recently spent a day with the Royal Mail SCV to see how the various safety items operate, as well as get some feedback from a typical end user. In this case, RM driver 'coach' Neil Kitchener. Our route was the regular '252 to Swindon' trunk, from the main UK hub at Rugby down to RM's Swindon RDC, before returning home again that afternoon. •