Theme announced for National Forklift Safety Day 2024 

BEGINNING ON June 11, this year’s campaign reflects the UK Material Handling Association’s (UKMHA) ambition to educate people about what to do in the event of an incident.  

UKMHA technical director David Goss, says: “National Forklift Safety Day provides us with an ideal opportunity to reinforce the importance of safe working practices for those who work with material handling equipment. The UKMHA is committed to helping companies and operators to uphold the highest standards of safety, and this initiative goes a long way towards achieving that goal.”

National Forklift Safety Day 2024 will focus on the 7 stages of the forklift incident cycle. The UKMHA will be releasing impactful content relevant to each stage of the cycle across the following dates:  

• Prepare: Tuesday 11 June 
• Respond: Wednesday 10 July 
• Investigate: Thursday 8 August 
• Report: Friday 13 September 
• Restart: Saturday 12 October 
• Learn: Sunday 10 November 
• Prevent: Monday 9 December 

Each stage represents a specific strategy for dealing with a forklift incident. By spreading our campaign over different days across seven months, we hope to fulfil our ambition to ‘make every day National Forklift Safety Day’. The first stage, Prepare, delves into the preparatory steps that should be taken to minimise the chance of a forklift incident becoming a forklift accident. We will be releasing various resources to support this part of the campaign, including compliance checklists, animation videos, and real-world case studies. 

The National Forklift Safety Day initiative has been raising awareness about the safe use of material handling equipment since its launch by our US counterpart, the Industrial Truck Association (ITA), in 2014. In 2019, the British Industrial Truck Association (BITA) took up the campaign. BITA eventually merged with the Forklift Truck Association (FLTA) to create the UKMHA, the trade association that has organised the UK’s version of National Forklift Safety Day ever since.  

Dedicated to promoting safety standards across the entire material handling industry, the UKMHA invites everyone to participate in National Forklift Safety Day 2024. 

For more information, visit the official National Forklift Safety Day website