All adventure activities personal protective equipment (PPE) requires inspection prior to and after use. Therefore, all personnel who use PPE should be able to inspect their own equipment and the equipment used by group members and clients who they are responsible for to ensure its safe condition before use. Some relevant areas for PPE inspection are outlined below.
For those of you familiar with PPE inspections and PPE inspection systems they can seem to be a ‘tick the box’ exercise when the inventory is seemingly endless in large centres. It may entail paper based system with faded equipment serial codes and lots of manual handwritten data. Tedious, costly and labour intensive might be three words that spring to mind for adventure centre owners and instructors. So is there an easier route?
Try combing Tough Tags gear labelling with the innovative inspection management system of Papertrail. Check out their free guide to improving your adventure centre or Climbing Wall safety system. Papertrail is designed for managing PPE and Health and Safety inspections and it does so in an easy and straightforward way. It can be pricey once your inventory increases in size and you may discover you never realised how many bits of gear you had. However, having an accurate digital record with proven history may well come in useful if an accident takes place and a potential legal process is started.
Legislation and management systems:
- CE Marking and Standards
- Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations
- Work at Height Regulations – https://www.hsa.ie/eng/Topics/Work_at_Height/
- The Protection of Children and Young Persons – https://www.hsa.ie/eng/Publications_and_Forms/Publications/General_Application_Regulations/Protection_of_Children_and_Young_Persons.html
- Product marking
- Record keeping
- Certificates of conformity
- Disposal of failed items
Equipment inspection and selection:
- Inspection techniques
- Failure criteria
- Common failures
- Obsolescence
Care, maintenance and storage of the following:
- Helmets (including water activity helmets)
- Ropes
- Harnesses
- Connectors
- Slings/anchor strops
- Ascenders
- Descenders
- Belay devices
- Energy absorbing devices
- Buoyancy aids