St Andrew’s Tutorial Services Ltd has been fined after a teacher sustained serious injuries when she was struck by a delivery van.
Cambridge Crown Court heard that on 26 February 2016, the 48-year-old teacher was on a trip to the UK, bringing students to the college from Italy. Whilst at the front of St Andrew’s College, Station Road, Cambridge, the driver reversed over the teacher, only stopping his delivery vehicle after members of the public alerted him. The teacher sustained multiple fractures and crush injuries; her head was just inches away from one of the tyres.
An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that St Andrew’s Tutorial Services Ltd had not adequately segregated vehicles and pedestrians. Although the company had identified measures that would likely have prevented this incident, it failed to implement them.
St Andrew’s Tutorial Services Ltd of Station Road, Cambridge pleaded guilty to breaching Regulation 17(1) of the Workplace Health & Safety and welfare Regulations. The company was fined £30,000 and ordered to pay costs of £9,197.78.
After the hearing HSE inspector Sandra Dias said: “This was a distressing and completely avoidable incident, the failure of the host company to implement safe systems of work, caused a visiting driver to carry out his own flawed assessment and an unsafe manoeuvre, resulting in horrific injuries to a teacher carrying out work on an overseas visit to the UK.
“The company failed to undertake a number of simple safety measures including segregated areas for vehicles and pedestrians, implementing a one-way system to reduce reversing in areas there were likely to be pedestrians and designated areas for delivery vehicles.”