Accident Prevention “More Important”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31780, 10 September 1968, Page 16

Accident Prevention “More Important”

It is more important to prevent accidents than it is to prevent injuries, according to Mr G. V. Williams, secretary of the Canterbury Branch of the National Safety Association.

Mr Williams said that an Interesting point was raised by “Safety" in a letter to “The Press,” who suggested that Accident Prevention Week—being held this week—should be termed “Injury Prevention Week.” “Too often accidents are considered impossible to prevent and the term accident is used as an excuse. It is, however, more important to prevent accidents than injuries,” Mr Williams said. Many “accidents," so termed, caused damage to equipment, tools, and the product being made, and it might be purely a matter of chance whether'a person were injured or not. . “These other losses, however, form part of the un-

insured cost of accidents, and are important from management’s point of view,” said Mr Williams. “Where accidents are difficult or impossible to prevent—and not many of them are—steps are taken to prevent injury to the worker by means of personal protective devices, but fundamentally it is better to stop the accident than the injury “Nobody would suggest that we could be satisfied if we prevented all injuries caused in road accidents, but still had the accidents themselves—which cause thousands of dollars worth of damage to vehicles each year. “A tractor safety-frame will ndt stop a tractor rolling but it will, in many cases, prevent serious injury or death. This is injury prevention. From the point of view of accident control, however, it is better to try to prevent the tractor rolling than protect the driver with a safety frame—although this is important. An overturning tractor may be seriously and expensively damaged even although no-one is injured,” Mr Williams said.