More than three million food service employees and over one million guests are injured annually as a result of slips, trips, and falls in America’s restaurants. According to the National Floor Safety Institute (NFSI), the hospitality industry spends over $2 billion dollars on such injuries each year; and these injuries are increasing at a rate of about ten percent annually.
Slips, trips, and falls can happen in the dining room, kitchen, buffet area, parking lot, entryway, restroom, stairways—anywhere on the premises. Many times they happen while employees are working around ice bins where ice can easily fall onto the floor forming puddles; working in busy, congested areas; walking or running on slippery or uneven floor surfaces; carrying dishes around blind corners or stairs; and using single door entry to and from the kitchen area. Slips, trips, and falls are often a result of failing to follow proper floor cleaning procedures, such as not following instructions on cleaning product labels, using the wrong cleaning agent for the flooring surface, not properly rinsing the cleaning product after scrubbing, using dirty or insufficiently maintained equipment and tools, not posting 
proper warning signs, or failing to schedule cleaning in a timely fashion.
These Incidents Are Mostly Preventable
A great number of these slip, trip, and fall incidents are preventable by restaurant management keeping safety top-of-mind and a major priority. Management must create a safer and healthier environment for all employees and guests by developing, implementing, maintaining, and providing ongoing training of an industry standard slip and fall protection program (written operating policies, practices, and procedures).
It is Restaurant OSHA Safety and Security and restaurant industry standard for management to not only develop and implement a slip and fall protection program, but also to commit to providing ongoing training of the program to employees, and further, to evaluate the program on a regular basis to ensure the program’s effectiveness and determine whether the program needs to be changed, revised, or updated in some way to make it more effective.
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