Imagine the legal ramifications if an up-and-coming Ian Thorpe or Pat Rafter was to be seriously hurt or even disabled in a slip and fall accident in a changing room.

If it could be proven that the floor surface had poor slip resistance, the financial consequences could stretch out into the multiple millions.

It could send those responsible broke – in exactly the same way that an employer or building owner can be sent broke if they neglect their responsibilities in public and workplace facilities (such as change rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, canteens, hallways, production areas and workshop areas).

I came across the sportsman analogy recently when studying a paper by Standards Australia spokesman Richard Bowman in which he alerts people to the availability of the Standards Australia Handbook 197 guide for specifying slip resistance.

Such articles really should be compulsory reading for all employers, in my experience as an expert witness appearing in cases where business owners are being sued for taking insufficient care in ensuring their floors are safe in foreseeable situations.

Because figures from the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission (NOHSC) show Australian industry now has well over 20,000 new workers compensation cases a year where falls, slips and trips result in death, permanent disability or a temporary disability resulting in an absence from work of more than a week.

The cost of these new claims is hundreds of millions of dollars a year – and absolutely certain to rise as courts find that many of the incidents are preventable. Once the level of awareness in Australian courts reaches the level of awareness in the US system, then all local employers (of whom I am one) should be very aware of their responsibilities.

Because workplace safety is a concern to everyone. Employees, employers, risk managers, insurers and even visitors are impacted by the level of commitment to safety at your physical facility. As long as businesses have existed, one of the most common and costly threats to a workplace safety program has been the slip and fall accident.

To understand this, let’s get technical for a moment. Friction, also referred to as traction, is the relationship of object to surface; foot to floor. In terms of slip resistance, it is the resistance to lateral (forward) movement caused by the foot touching the ground.

To determine the slip resistance of any surface, you must determine the Coefficient of Friction (COF) on the surface. The COF is the horizontal force divided by the vertical force. The higher the coefficient of friction reading, the less slippery a surface.

Coefficient of Friction has become an important measure of performance for floor surfaces and to the anti-fatigue and safety matting industry. To guard against slip and fall accidents, the American OSHA recommends a static coefficient of friction of .5. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) specifies a coefficient of friction of .6 on flat surfaces and .8 on ramps.

With these recommendations in place, the concept of slip resistance has basically been elevated to a civil right. Right now, the static coefficient of friction of .5 is seen as legal and enforceable benchmark for slip-resistant pedestrian walkways. Similar standards of protection will ultimately arrive in Australia.

We can spend as much as we like on protective clothing, eyeglasses, earmuffs, helmets and the like, but if the floor under our employees’ feet isn’t safe then - literally and legally - we haven’t got a leg to stand on.

Nor will a helmet or safety clothing benefit you much if workers suffer a sprain or strain of the joints or adjacent muscles – and these types of injuries account for fully 50 per cent of new workers compensation cases.

Yet employers can do a lot to address the problem by undertaking a little homework to direct their safety investment.

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