How rental companies are promoting health and safety
04 December 2024
Construction equipment rental companies in Europe and North America are making different efforts to improve their employees’ health and safety.
These efforts include a project led by the European Rental Association (ERA) to gather data on accidents in the European rental industry, identify critical types of accidents and the most frequently injured body parts, and establish an industry-wide benchmark to improve health and safety.
For this project, the ERA received accident data from seven rental companies and two rental associations under confidential agreements. Before publishing a full report in early 2025, it shared some preliminary findings with IRN.
Renta Group is taking remedial actions to strive toward its zero-accident goal. (Photo: KHL)
Among the key findings was that in 2022, the seven surveyed rental companies reported 531 accidents, which resulted in 4,068 lost working days.
This translates into an average of six lost working days per accident. The consolidated loss time injury (LTI), which refers to the number of lost time injuries occurring in the workplace per one million hours worked, is 14.4.
Tomas Babicky, senior association manager at Kellen Company, which manages the ERA, told IRN, “This is the first benchmark that we were able to come up with. It’s a pilot because only seven companies have participated in developing this benchmark.”
“In order to be more representative, we would need a much broader sample, but as a pilot, this is a good indicator.”
“We want to develop this into a rolling benchmark to track the trend,” he added.
“As the industry is becoming more professional and mature, we would expect the number of accidents to decrease, hopefully.”
Babicky explained that most accidents involved technical staff in delivery, mechanics, traffic management, or warehouse operations. He said more than half of the reported accidents were in the centre body sections, including arm, hand, and torso.
The gathered data also showed that hand tool vibration is the most common injury in the rental sector.
He said equipment manufacturers, rental companies, and construction firms have a shared responsibility in this area and should collaborate to improve the design of these hand tools, provide safety guidelines, and ensure that they are strictly implemented.
Collaborations in the industry
Image generated with AI via Ideogram 2.0
Meanwhile, Léna Guyon, policy officer social affairs at the European Construction Industry Federation (FIEC), said the most common accidents in the construction industry are exposure to hazardous substances, work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), working with machines and falls from heights.
“Health and safety in the construction sector is the responsibility of all actors involved, from the workers to the employers, as well as the equipment makers,” she said.
“What is essential is to develop a regular dialogue, in particular between construction companies and machines/equipment manufacturers, to continuously improve the safety features according to the actual needs and constraints on a work site, and also to integrate and make better use of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI).”
Guyon added that it can be challenging for some companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to apply the European legislations that set up occupational exposure limits for some substances and to access new techniques or technologies. She said companies need support, guidance and financial support to ensure their employees’ health and safety.
In recent years, FIEC, together with the European Federation of Building and Woodworkers (EFBWW), has conducted many European Union-funded projects related to health and safety at work, including the launches of a guide to help companies deal with situations on a work site that may have asbestos and a guide with good practices for respirable crystalline silica.
In 2022, FIEC, EFBWW, and the European Sectoral Social Partner for the construction industry issued a joint declaration on reducing work-related accidents/diseases under the EU strategic framework on health and safety at work 2021-2027. FIEC launched a step-by-step guide on how construction firms can adopt an occupational safety and health (OSH) management system.
More targeted solutions
According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, US workers in transportation and material moving occupations experienced 1,620 fatal work injuries in 2022, making them the occupational group with the most fatalities.
Workers in construction and extraction occupations had the second most fatalities, with 1,056 cases in 2022. Falls, slips or trips accounted for about 40% of these fatalities. The fatality rate for this occupation group increased from 12.3 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2021 to 13 in 2022.
The number of fatal accidents in the construction industry in the EU (Source: Eurostat)
In the EU, the number of fatal accidents in the construction industry rose from 741 in 2021 to 754 in 2022, according to Eurostat data. The fatality rate for this sector was about 6.3 deaths per 100,000 workers.
The number of non-fatal accidents in the construction industry in the EU fell from 369,145 cases in 2021 to 363,731 cases in 2022.
The number of non-fatal accidents in the construction industry in the EU (Source: Eurostat)
However, Babicky said the number of accidents in the entire construction sector may not reflect the situation in the rental sector, which mainly involves minor accidents that lead to a couple of lost working days.
He said higher transparency about accidents in the rental sector would help industry players formulate more targeted solutions and improve the industry’s overall image to attract young talents.
However, not all rental companies would voluntarily disclose their accident figures. One that does is Finland-based Renta Group.
In its sustainability report, the company reported 15 accidents in 2023, compared with 23 cases a year ago. It said its lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) dropped to 4.65 from 9.64 for the same period, but the number of sick leave days caused by accidents increased to 220 from 206.
The company said that although accidents such as falls, cuts, and crush injuries may occur despite its preventative efforts, it remains committed to investigating the causes of these accidents and taking remedial actions to strive toward its zero-accident goal.
United Rentals, which also makes its accident figures public, said its total recordable incident rate (TRIR), which measures the number of work-related injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time employees over a year, was 0.75 in 2023, compared with 0.76 in 2022.
“We utilize a mixture of indicators to assess the safety performance of our operations, including TRIR, preventable motor vehicle incidents per million miles, corrective actions and near miss frequency and have disclosed a goal to reduce our TRIR further,” said the company. “We also recognise outstanding safety behaviours through our annual awards program.”
In 2022, the company set a new goal to reduce its TRIR to 0.40 by 2030.
Mental health
According to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), the construction industry has relatively few procedures and measures to deal with psychosocial risks because attention has focused elsewhere on important risk factors, such as falls from heights and construction machines.
The ERA has tried to collect data on health issues among rental firms’ employees, but it has found that data collection is not feasible at the current stage.
“Compared to safety issues, it is much more difficult to gather concrete data for health issues, which are long-term,” Babicky said. “More crucially, health issues are more sensitive regarding what the companies can report because of privacy concerns.”
He said the ERA will continue to raise awareness of health issues in the rental industry and encourage rental companies to discuss them more. He said people can only address the problems that they know about.
FIEC said in a report in 2019 that construction workers’ mental health could deteriorate due to long working hours or a worsening job market like what was seen in 2008-2015.
In 2020, United Rentals launched a Live Well, Safe & Healthy program to encourage healthy behaviours and to raise morale, productivity and overall employee engagement. The program includes a biometric screening at work or off-site, a health assessment, a paid day off to be used for a wellness exam or day of service, tobacco cessation support, and participation incentives. About 63% of employees participated in the program in 2023.
Accidental deaths in the UK reach an “all-time high”
Accidental death rates in the UK are at an all-time high and have risen by 42% over the last decade.
That’s according to a report by RoSPA (Royal Society of the Prevention of Accidents), in partnership with Speedy Hire.
The ‘Safer Lives, Stronger Nation’ report found that accidental deaths are now the second biggest killer of people under 40, taking more than 20,000 lives each year, with construction accounting for 37% of fatal workplace accidents.
It found that almost half (46%) of all accidental deaths (over 9,700 people) in 2022 resulted from falls, which was the leading cause of death and injury from accidents.
Over a quarter (26%) resulted from poisonings and 7% were because of a road traffic accident or transport related incidents.
Falls also accounted for nearly two-thirds (61%) of all accident-related hospital admissions (almost 450,000 instances).
Accidents from crushing, striking, powered hand tools and machinery (known medically as ‘exposure to inanimate mechanical forces’) accounted for over one in 10 (12%) of all accident-related hospital admissions, and 7% were because of a road traffic accident or transport-related incident.
Accident-related hospital admissions
Accidental deaths have risen in England (up 48%), Scotland (up 60%), Wales (up 42%) and Northern Ireland (up 67%) since 2013, while in England alone accident-related hospital admissions for serious injuries have risen by 48% in the last two decades.
RoSPA’s new report also highlighted the strain accidents put on the NHS. In England in 2023, over 4.4 million bed days were used up to treat patients with accident-related injuries, costing the NHS an estimated £4.6 billion.
Across the UK, accidents led to around 5.2 million bed days, which come at an estimated cost of £5.4 billion to the NHS last year.
Meanwhile, accidents resulted in around 7 million Accident & Emergency (A&E) visits across the UK last year, costing a further £613 million, bringing the total cost of accidents to the NHS to at least £6 billion annually.
At the same time, it estimates that 7.7 million working days were lost by those who were unable to work after an accident as they’d been admitted to hospital, or by their carers who took time off work to be with them in 2022 and 2023.
A further 21 million working days were lost by those who had to attend A&E after an accident.
National Accident Prevention Strategy
Following the findings RoSPA is calling for the Government to create a National Accident Prevention Strategy, which it said will “save lives, boost the economy and free up capacity in the NHS.”
Becky Hickman, chief executive at RoSPA, said the report unveils “a new public health scandal.” She said“The UK is facing an accident crisis. We are all substantially more likely to suffer a serious accident today than we were 20 years ago. We must take action now to stop further preventable deaths and serious injuries – accidents are avoidable and do not need to happen.
“Even those who have never been involved in an accident are still suffering, as increasing numbers of accidents are choking the UK economy and engulfing the NHS – taking up bed space, money, time and resources that could be directed to other serious illnesses.”
Dan Evans, chief executive at Speedy Hire, added, “We take health and safety extremely seriously, and it is a source of immense pride that we have been recognised for our excellence in keeping colleagues and customers safe. For us, colleague safety doesn’t begin and end at the workplace door, which is why at Speedy Hire we take a ‘whole person, whole life’ approach.
“This has never been more important to do so, as RoSPA’s report reveals people are far more likely to suffer a serious accident at home than they are at work. Both the cost of accidents to peoples’ personal lives and to businesses is far too high, so we must act now to keep people safe and support economic growth.”
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