Case Studies
Welcome to the Top Edge Case Study Library
The library is full of real life safety stories – many when someone has sadly suffered an injury or worse, and some when harm was happily escaped. Hopefully they will help you identify your risks, and which risks need to be managed.
Health and Safety can be a bit of a dry subject to learn, and sometimes to teach – lots of theories, principles and legal references, and endless pictures of wet floor signs and cartoon characters picking up boxes with bent knees and straight backs!
When I am teaching, I keep away from the wet floor signs and cartoons, and use lots of case studies and real-life incidents to make it interesting, illustrate the point I am making, and add a bit of colour. When doing so, I often find myself saying, ‘and this is a good example of……’ when making the link between an accident that has happened, or a court case that has led to a prosecution, to one of those dry theories, principles or legal references.
So, here are lots of ‘good examples’…to help you make those links, and help you manage your safety more effectively. They are only brief summaries, and I know they lack detail, but hopefully there are enough words to set the scene and represent what has happened.
Also, when assessing risk you have to think about what is ‘reasonably foreseeable’. These case studies will hopefully help with this process – they may nudge you to think about what really could happen to you, your workplace or your sports club. They all happened, so they could happen again.
For most case studies, I have not included the names of individuals or organisations, or indeed dates when the accidents happened. These details are really not important. What is important is the opportunity to learn from what happened, regardless of who was responsible or injured. If the case studies pre-date 1974 then the year is stated, and there are some interesting historical cases in there (at least interesting to me). The majority are from the past fifty years since 1974, and while you may think that accidents from, say twenty, thirty or forty years ago, may not be relevant today, they are – the laws are as applicable now as they were then.
Most of the information used is derived from sources in the public domain, and I have referenced them accordingly. Some are based on my own personal experience, and some have been presented to me by learners on courses I have taught.
Each case study is structured the same way. The ‘What happened’ and ‘Legal Outcome’ sections are essentially me re-writing information I have researched. The ‘What can we learn from what happened?’ section is me commenting on the case study and hopefully helping to develop the reader’s learning. These are my comments, and other health and safety practitioners may hold different views because there is sometimes scope for interpretation.
Please use the categories to help you search for the case studies most relevant to you. About half the case studies relate in some way to physical activities or the hospitality/entertainment sector, so these can be very directly applied a sport and leisure setting. Most of the rest can also be applied to sport and leisure, but in a more indirect way.
The case studies are all quite short, no more than 500 words each, so about two to three minutes to read – I am trying to keep the case study library as accessible and understandable as possible. I hope you find them useful, and if you share them with your staff, then please remember to mention where the information was sourced and credit Top Edge for presenting it.
And please keep checking the website, as I will be adding to the library on a regular basis.
Many thanks
Graham Freeborn
Director, Top Edge Training