Rope access safety awareness training: educating the safety professional in rope access.
It’s been a continuous obstacle we’ve faced since entering the rope access industry years ago to communicate to Safety Professionals and Employers on the benefits of utilizing ropes to access work at height, and it typically starts with a terminal stare from a group of HSSE & Compliance Professionals. Then comes those forbidden words from the Lead Compliance Officer: “You’re going to hang off rope three hundred feet in the air and do what?”
This is almost always followed by the rest of the administrative and safety professionals pointing out that scaffolds and cranes are their normal standard operating procedure. When asked why, the response is the same: “We’ve always done it that way.”
Just because you’ve always done it that way, doesn’t mean it’s the safest method.
These experiences with managers and safety professionals have gotten much better given the fact that rope access is rapidly growing across the United States. Companies of all sizes now see rope access as a safer method of accessing difficult areas, not to mention it is cost effective and a valid revenue stream. However well-intentioned, HSSE & Safety Compliance Professionals continue to confuse conventional fall arrest methods with rope access methods.
We’ve always said that experience leads to innovation. With that concept in mind, we developed Abseilon’s Rope Access Safety Awareness Training for Administrative Professionals, HSSE and Safety Compliance Professionals to supply them with the tools and guidelines necessary to adopt a company rope access program.
This course is specifically designed to educate companies and safety professionals who are responsible for fall protection programs but may not work at height or maintain a SPRAT Certification, with the goal of bridging the gap between the administrative branch of companies with their service technicians. Learning to understand the profound safety of the procedures, guidelines and standards of rope access makes for a well rounded company of professionals of all levels. Safety doesn’t happen by accident, and the first step to insuring that is for all parties involved in working at height to be well educated in what the work actually entails.
