Tirlán’s Health & Safety campaign is all about protecting the people around you

Now in its second year, Tirlán’s ‘Don’t Walk By For July’ campaign is raising awareness of how colleagues can keep each other safe at work. The campaign is running across all sites, with a particular focus on operations and branches. The aim, says Tom Crosbie, Head of Health and Safety at Tirlán, is to raise risk awareness within the business and promote the ownership of safety between staff. “What we found last year was that a campaign like this improves the overall culture around health & safety. We’re taking a proactive approach to safety, as opposed to reacting when an accident happens.”

This July, employees are being asked to raise a good save card. The ‘save’ could be pointing out something on site that needs to be improved, a piece of plant and machinery that isn’t working properly or an obvious hazard that needs to be addressed. “Once it’s brought to our attention, we can get ahead of the problem. Nobody wants to see anyone get hurt so we’re reinforcing our philosophy of protecting the people around you. At the end of the day, we all want to go home safe.”

With last year’s inaugural campaign, about 200 additional good saves were raised. “We found that people’s awareness around safety was raised and that’s what we’re going for again this year. We want to heighten that awareness across all facets of the business, but particularly across all operational areas. To build on engagement the Health & Safety team, who have done tremendous work to engage our people over the last number of years, will be speaking at various forums and engaging with site managers, frontline managers and operators on the ground.”

From October last year to March 2023, zero lost time accidents were reported across all sites. “A small number of accidents have started to creep in again, so the time is right to focus on the proactive side of safety.” Tom says Tirlán is on a path to achieving world class safety performance. “Our aim is to achieve 0.42 Lost Time Accident Incidence Rate (LTIR) in 2023. By 2025, we want to achieve a world class status of 0.28. These proactive measures that we’re implementing, such as ‘Don’t Walk By for July’, are an important step towards achieving these targets.”

Over the next few months, Tom and his team intend to complete a H&S culture measure across all areas of the business. “That will give us a really good insight into the culture of safety on our sites. It will also inform what we need to concentrate on going forward. It’s like we’re firing darts at a board – we know we are firing in the right direction, but we need to up our game if we’re to hit the board every time.”