The Safety on the Lines magazine is boldly moving in a new direction. Our first magazine was published in 2013, and this is the 11th occupational safety publication for service providers. Occupational safety is Fingrid’s number one priority in all its activities, and that’s why we decided to link Safety on the Lines to our customer magazine.
Our occupational safety theme for 2019 is: Building safety culture together. Developing and maintaining occupational safety at worksites requires broad-based cooperation with service providers, customers and other stakeholders. As a result, it’s natural to distribute the Safety on the Lines magazine at worksites and also more widely to other stakeholders.
Our primary emotion regarding 2018 is a sense of gratitude. This means gratitude for all the people working in Fingrid investments and maintenance, who have made an outstanding effort to develop and maintain occupational safety. We’re also grateful that Fingrid worksites are safe places to work which did not experience a single serious occupational accident last year. In terms of occupational safety, 2018 was a great success according to many indicators, both lagging and leading. We achieved the combined target set for lost-time injury frequency (<5 lost-time injuries / one million working hours). The combined lost-time injury frequency for 2018 was 3.2.
Although 2018 went well as a whole, there is always room for improvement. Approximately 120 near miss situations were reported, 4 of which were classified as serious. However, we’re particularly happy that a record number of safety observations – more than 500 – were made. I would like to encourage everyone to continue submitting observations so that we can identify risk factors in advance.
Our challenging goal for 2019 is to maintain a high level of occupational safety while moving towards the target of zero accidents. Occupational accidents are rarely caused by technical issues such as equipment failure. The cause is more likely to be human actions, and that’s why occupational safety is all about attitude. Let’s all work safely, avoid taking risks, and intervene immediately in unsafe activities. Intervention means caring about co-workers and it is everyone’s right and responsibility. Let’s continue developing and maintaining occupational safety together in accordance with the theme for 2019.
Karri Koskinen
Expert, Safety
