A worker severed four finger in a guillotine accident at work - 13th January 2010

Centriforce Products has been ordered to pay almost £5,000 following a workplace accident in which a man lost four fingers.

The workplace accident, in May 2008, occurred when machine operator Wesley Dickinson and a colleague had been working on a plastic cutting machine. The plastic had become jammed and Dickinson, thinking that his colleague had turned off the automatic guillotine switch, tried to clear the blockage. As he did so the guillotine cutter came down on his hand, severing four fingers.

Dickinson was in hospital for three weeks with surgeons eventually managing to re-attach two of the fingers, but he will be unable to carry out any manual work in the foreseeable future.

Liverpool Magistrates Court fined Centriforce Products £2,500 with £2,438 in prosecution costs for breaching the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations which state that an employer must stop employees having access to dangerous machine parts.

HSE inspector Martin Paren said: “The company should have had a guard on the guillotine to prevent workers from reaching the blade. An automatic mechanism should also have been in place so that the power was cut if the guard was opened. Instead Mr Dickinson wrongly assumed that a colleague had switched the guillotine off, and he had four fingers cut off as a result."

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