Maintenance activities, which are essential in most companies, can have detrimental effects on the safety of all employees, mainly because the maintenance person must always enter hazardous zones to carry out his interventions. Except for lockout, very little work has been done on the protection of maintenance personnel during their interventions.

Maintenance intervention safety is strongly linked to three factors: the equipment (the machines) that must be maintained and the configuration of the space around it; the appropriate training of maintenance personnel, sufficient knowledge about the machine involved, and the appropriateness of the tools; and work organization in the company.

This report describes an exploratory project whose objectives were: to determine whether relationships exist between maintenance activities and occupational health and safety; to paint a portrait of maintenance; to review the literature relating to maintenance and OHS; and to develop a thematic research program. Furthermore, it contains an analysis of the maintenance accidents that have occurred in Québec. As well, the authors discuss lockout, machine design, confined spaces, and belt conveyors, At the end, they propose avenues for research, whose objective will be to fill in some of the gaps noted during the study or to generate new solutions for the diagnosed problems.