Safety Speaker Services
Gary offers a safety awareness presentation that features a hard-hitting, emotional, 40-minute talk that can be extended to suit the audience with a pre-prepared Q&A session of typical questions, or live questions from the floor.
It carries a strong safety message, letting the audience see the stark reality of what a fall from height accident means, not only to the individual, but their family and others involved.
Health and Safety Behavioural Awareness
There are basic health and safety lessons that can be learned from Gary’s story, and anyone with knowledge of CDM Regulations would be able to see how the changes made to those regulations were a good thing for any unsuspecting visitor to a dangerous site, exposed to a potential death trap.
Gary’s Fall From Height Story
Gary’s story is told in the third person. The reason for telling the story in this way is because to look at him, you would never know what he has been through. It isn’t until midway through the presentation that he reveals that the accident victim is him. Gary is not naïve enough to think that the audience would not have guessed, or come to that conclusion before the big revelation, but whether you know his story beforehand or not, it is still captivating.
Gary fell 32 ft onto his hands and face from a building in Paisley near Glasgow, July 1996. Years later the doctor who performed surgery to his right hand (whilst Canniesburn Surgeons took nine hours of maxillofacial surgery to rebuild his shattered face) told him, that his face had been “literally detached from his skull”.
He suffered multiple facial fractures. His nose was telescoped backwards and left cheekbone shattered, resulting in the optic nerve severing and the loss of sight in one eye. The full detail of his injuries are featured in his talk.
Where Gary’s story is slightly different from other fall from height stories (still the biggest cause of workplace fatalities) is where he describes his near-death experience and what was going through his mind in the immediate aftermath of the fall, and the two weeks in a coma that followed. This is not done for any spiritual reason, or for the purposes of having people believe in some sort of afterlife, as a matter of fact, he tries to make sense of what he experienced from a neurological point of view.
Online Safety Talks
Gary now offers a range of new online safety training talks, which have been developed to expand upon his original Fall From Height accident story. The options below can be used as independent training talks. The benefits that can be taken from each are not dependent upon hearing Gary’s original presentation.
- Work at Height Regulations (2005) Awareness Talk
- Construction Design and Management Regulations (2015) Awareness Talk
- Stress in the Workplace
Health and Safety Speaker UK | Gary Gallagher 