Vision Training for Forklift Drivers
Author: Sensori Safety Published: 11/25/2021 Time: 2 Minutes
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), forklifts cause about 85 fatal accidents per year, with 34,900 accidents resulting in serious injury, and 61,800 classified as non-serious. The Industrial Truck Association (ITA), states that there are about 855,900 forklifts in the U.S. Therefore, over 11% of all forklifts will be involved in some type of accident each year (assuming only one accident per forklift).
The ITA also reports that the useful life of a lift truck is about 8 years. This means that about 90% of all forklifts will be involved in some type of accident in its lifetime, assuming there is only one accident per forklift. There is a possibility that at least one driver per forklift will be involved in a forklift incident at some point in their career.
Studies show that many of these accidents could have been prevented with better forklift training. We agree, but also wonder, what type of training? Forklift driving training is good for teaching skills and providing knowledge, but alone it does not guarantee a reduction in forklift incidents. With years of conducting forklift training and investigating accidents, one of the biggest factors noted was that the operator did not see the object they struck, nor did they see the pedestrian walking in the direction of travel. Many times, operators will receive drug testing, and undergo more forklift training and even receive disciplinary actions but things don’t seem to change. The root cause of the incident will be labeled operator error when in turn it could be that the operator lacked the speed to react, lacked visual clarity, or lacked the hand-eye coordination needed to make a quick decision. Ask your team the last time your forklift driver completed vision testing and training. Don’t take your operators' vision for granted. To truly combat the risk of forklift accidents we must test and train the operators' vision.
Sensori Safety was created to provide preventative services to help assess, analyze, measure and training the operator’s vision performance, helping employers understand the operator’s speed, accuracy, depth perception, peripheral awareness and hand-eye coordination.
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