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Hard Hat Awareness Week – love them or hate them – they save lives!

Let’s all help by driving awareness of brain injury and other trauma to the head, face, etc through activities designed to encourage best practice around safety equipment – and this is why we and thousands of companies like us are getting behind Hard Hat Awareness Week across the UK, and indeed the rest of the world

The impact of a brain injury can be life-changing for both the injured person but also their wider family, friends, colleagues, suppliers, clients and the medics, doctors and nurses that come to potentially save your life!

Wearing a hard hat, maintaining and storing it appropriately, and being more concussion and head injury aware are all vital to keeping hard hat wearers, THAT’S YOU,  safe. It can be cumbersome at times when we are working, but just one mistake can be costly.

Even a minor brain injury or bump to the head can have a major impact, so take time to stop work, report the incident and recover fully!

Data now suggests that most head injuries are not even reported, and unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion around RIDDOR where the reported incidents of head injury are mis-reported as other incidents, which seeing as your head contains the one thing that controls all your body, is rather silly. This does not give a clear understanding of the head injuries that are occurring across all industries, regardless of whether we are working in construction or rail.

Think about it this way reporting the incident exactly as it happened is key to providing statistical information to enable manufacturers and standard makers to increase the protection level, comfort level, user wearability and more in hard hats to help protect against these incidents. Or in other words, look at the advancements in helmet technology for say motor bike riders, down hill skiers, racing drivers and in fact most sports now require some form of head protection?

If you drop or damage a hard hat, get it replaced! Speak to your immediate superior, client, or employer and asked to be issued a replacement, it’s their duty to make sure you are safe at work, or simply raise awareness to them of Hard Hat Safety Week.

And lastly, if you are replacing your hard hat don’t throw it in a general waste skip, get it recycled, there are many companies that will now take used hard hats and reduce them down to plastic chips for reuse in the plastics industry, better still, like we do here at AW Group, reach out to local communities, especially those involved in community gardens, forest schools etc they make excellent hanging baskets!

Let’s remind people, whether that be a friend, work colleague or even the client that you work for about the importance of wearing hard hats and taking any impact on the head seriously, not forgetting all the other PPE that is designed to protect us from our feet upwards and that should meet the requriements of the job or task we are performing!

AW Group is a multi-disciplined construction company providing a broad range of support and manpower across building and rail projects.

Our Fields are:

AW Construction – We offer an outstanding UK-wide fit out service, taking care of everything from scheduling rollouts & ordering materials to assistance with design and onsite delivery

AW Rail – We use the very best labour force and a proactive approach to deliver first-class construction and maintenance projects across the rail industry

AW Labour – We provide a high-calibre blue collar and white-collar workforce with a diverse range of skills, to support the construction and rail industries