Safety Inspections and Evacuation Chair Maintenance: What You Need to Know

At Evacuscape, we believe that everyone has the right to safety. All businesses should take employee, client and visitor well-being seriously — and that means for both day-to-day processes as well as evacuation measures in the event of an emergency.

Here, we will share a big-picture overview of the importance of workplace safety inspections. A workplace safety inspection will allow you to identify potential risks and hazards before they present themselves. Identifying possible safety hazards empowers you with the knowledge to proactively counter them, keeping your team and your company assets safe.

We’ll also share some information about evacuation chair maintenance — getting you, your team, and a key safety tool, your evacuation stair chairs, as prepared as possible should an emergency arise.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

Why Conduct a Safety Inspection?

The frequency of your safety inspections will vary based on several factors, including legal requirements in your area, company size, and frequency of use of heavy machinery, to name just a few. However, the benefits will remain the same.

In addition to identifying current and potential hazards, a safety inspection allows you to:

• Determine the cause and possible timeline of a hazard.
• Better understand the processes involved for each member of staff in response.
• Establish remedial measures.
• Stay on the right side of compliance.
• Hone and finesse the steps taken to reduce the risk of a hazard, whether that’s improving the processes for team members, investing in protective equipment, or looking one step beyond the potential hazard and preparing in case said risk presents itself. For example, a thorough safety inspection might show that you don’t have the correct type of fire extinguishers on site for the materials your team works with.

What Factors Influence a Safety Inspection?

There are a series of factors that contribute to the results of your safety inspection — each one will be unique to your situation. To put this in context, the safety inspection for a multi-storey office will look very different from that of a factory or a hotel.

Factors which should be considered in a safety inspection include, but aren’t limited to:

• Material usage: Chemicals, food or other.
• Capacity: How many workers are on site each day, and at what times?
• Equipment use: Heavy machinery, tools or otherwise.
• Environmental factors: Such as light, air quality and temperature.

A safety inspection won’t just consider elements as per above, but it will also focus on potential workplace hazards based on observation, such as:

• Safety hazards include team members using a piece of machinery without the appropriate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
• Ergonomic hazards, such as repetitive processes or inappropriate seating.
• Social hazards, such as overworked team members or poor break practices.

A safety inspection is a multi-faceted, in-depth review of your business’s current safety standards. Lighting, flooring, layout, equipment, and materials should all be factored into your safety inspection. Instead of perceiving an inspection as a bureaucratic chore, see it as an opportunity to keep team members and assets safe and on the right side of legislation.

What Else Should You Include in Your Safety Inspection?

A safety inspection should include a layout map of the business that details the locations of permanent fixtures like machinery, air ducts, stairwells and safety equipment, including fire extinguishers, sprinklers, and evacuation chairs.

If you still need an evacuation chair (or chairs) on-site, connect with us, and we can help you with choosing an evacuation chair for your needs. They’re a crucial tool during an emergency, enabling the safe and efficient evacuation of people with mobility challenges.

In addition to a diagram, your safety inspection should include copies of office rules and protocol, your emergency response plan, an equipment inventory, and past safety inspections.

This is a brief overview of the stages involved in completing a safety inspection. Hopefully it gives you some insight into hazard and risk management, and how keeping on top of both of these can seriously minimize the potential of an emergency — like a fire, explosion, building collapse, human-orchestrated violence, or gas leak.

Safety Inspections and Chair Maintenance: What You Need to Know

With safety inspections in mind, if you have an Evacuscape evacuation chair, performing routine safety inspection and maintenance checks at the same time is always a good idea. As you would with other items that are used to protect team members, keeping your safety tools in top condition ensures they’ll operate as they should when you need to deploy them.

We always recommend evacuation chair training for multiple, if not every, member of on-site personnel. Doing so ensures there’s always someone available to manage your chair(s) in the event of an emergency evacuation. We also suggest that chair training is conducted semi-frequently.

While chair use is very simple, hosting quarterly education sessions will keep deployment top of mind. It will also remind and allow you to perform routine safety checks of your chairs.

Safety Checks for Your Chair

While Evacuscape chairs are made with longevity in mind, checking each individual feature is a simple task; even though it won’t require much time, doing so can make all the difference in an emergency.

Here are a few elements to check.

• Make sure that the rear wheels click into place quickly and efficiently.
• Check that the rubber tracks that help to reduce descent speed while keeping the evacuee in an upright position are still in good shape and the rubber hasn’t started to deteriorate.
• Ensure the seatbelt fastens with no resistance.
• Check that the adjustable pins pull out with ease, allowing you to pull the adjustable handle upwards.
• Make sure you can push the rear wheels forward, below the chair’s seat, until they fold into the frame.
• On our ec2 model, test the brake bar and make sure it offers traction.

Connect with Us Today

Whatever your query — if you’d like to learn more about the proper maintenance of your evacuation chairs, how evacuation chairs fit into your emergency response plan, or even more about evacuation chair legislation — get in touch with us today! An Evacuscape team member will be more than happy to chat with you to find the best solution for your needs.