What is working at height in cleaning?
Working at height in cleaning covers anything above floor level — high-level dusting, window cleaning, light fittings and access equipment — and is a leading cause of serious injury in the sector.
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</figure>The commonest cause of injury is the least dramatic: standing on a chair, a desk or a windowsill because the right equipment is not to hand.
Extension poles and long-reach systems remove the need to work at height for a great deal of routine work, which is the hierarchy's first step applied practically.
Where access equipment is used it has to be inspected and the user trained, and neither is satisfied by the equipment simply being available.
In practice
A cleaner on a chair reaching a light fitting.
The high-level work was excluded from the specification, which is why no access equipment was provided, and the client asked nicely.
Every element of that is a decision somebody made except the last one, which is the only one anybody will remember if she falls.
An exclusion in a contract has to be matched by an instruction to staff, or the exclusion simply means nobody has equipped them for what they will do anyway.
What goes wrong in practice
- Improvised access — chairs, desks, windowsills — because equipment is elsewhere.
- Ladders used where a pole system would remove the need entirely.
- Access equipment inspection regimes not applied to cleaning equipment.