Hard Hat Awareness Week was introduced to drive awareness of industrial brain injuries, using activities designed to encourage best practice around safety equipment.
The impact of a brain injury can be life-changing for both the injured person but also their wider family and friends.
Wearing a hard hat, maintaining and storing it appropriately, and being more concussion and head injury aware are all vital to keeping hard hat wearers safe. We want to remind people about the importance of wearing hard hats and taking any impact on the head seriously. Even a minor brain injury can have a major impact, so take time to stop work, report the incident and recover fully before returning to work.
Most head injuries are not even reported, and unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion around RIDDOR where the reported incidents of head injuries are mis-reported as other incidents and can also be categorised into asphyxia. This does not give us a clear understanding of the head injuries that are occurring in the Industry.
HHAW would like to see a full body diagram in the RIDDOR report that enables reporters to clearly mark the area of injury as well as a description. What is also very important to know is was the person injured wearing a hard hat or not at the time they received the head injury, and currently, this is also not reported..
Reporting the incident exactly is key to providing statistical information to enable manufacturers and standard makers to increase the protection level in hard hats to help protect against these incidents.
HHAW want wearers to be safe and comfortable at all times, and by participating, you will help drive awareness across all industries and help keep people safe.