Safety

When we have catastrophic events such as the club fire in RI, the inspection process that allowed code violations to go uncorrected for two years needs to be revisited. Many inspectors view their daily work in a way that results in the low hanging fruit getting picked, but the more difficult to reach fruit on high branches going untouched. When an agency is responsible for inspections for compliance with safety, health, fire and/or environmental standards there needs to be a meaningful quality control or improvement program in place. Citizens or your community deserve no less.

With literally thousands of dangerous materials being used/transported/discarded every day, the process of choosing protective clothing has become increasingly complex for today’s safety and hygiene professional. It is important to understand the distinction between three broad types of protective garments used today. Generally classified as disposable, reusable, and limited-use garments, these three general categories provide a basic framework for clothing decisions.

The issuance of safety eyewear to employees requires more than a handout. An important thing to remember when issuing safety eyewear is that in order to put your safety program into action, you need to communicate and educate your employees. Merely handing out free safety goggles and glasses and saying “wear these when you are working or else…” will only get you so far. Employees need to know why it is important to wear protective eyewear, and they need you to make it easy for them to do so effectively. It often helps to recite employee eye injury statistics to show workers the reality of the hazards around them, and give them a starting point for improvement.

The challenge of managing the aspects of occupational health and safety (OH&S) in the workplace can often times feel overwhelming. There are many legal, moral and financial reasons for you to pay attention to OH&S obligations. With all of these challenges, it’s important not to waste time, money or place efforts on things that simply don’t work. In terms of successfully managing OH&S issues, the following Top 10 list includes some of the common errors that organizations make.

For management, new and untrained employees present a different set of costly challenges. For example, productivity will drop due to lost time, there may be overtime expenses, insurance costs will rise and there can be potential lost customer sales. Worker’s compensation claims will also increase and lead to higher premiums. How can these problems be avoided? What are some steps that can be put in place to help alleviate these concerns for new and untrained workers already in the workforce? Ideally, health and safety programs that offer basic training will fit the bill quite nicely. New and untrained workers need to learn about personal protective equipment (PPE), back-injury prevention, health and safety regulations and hazard recognition.

Work-related deaths at U.S. manufacturing plants declined 14.0 percent in 2007, marking a rebound from the 16.0 percent increase that occurred in 2006. This was among the findings of the new Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries report released recently by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Because maintenance departments are often recognized as caretakers of company safety initiatives, they’re inundated with all things safety: messages, procedures, meetings, checks, equipment, training and permits, etc. Despite their good intentions, however, some maintenance professionals still get hurt on the job. To understand why, we need only to draw a parallel with automobile accidents.

Hour after hour, in businesses of all sizes, these workhorses respond to the men and women who operate them – by pounding, cutting, crushing, welding, stitching or whatever other task they were designed for, to fashion the products that will be marketed to hungry consumers. But there is a fearful downside to this scenario: the machine cannot distinguish between a piece of wood, steel or fabric and the operator’s body.

You see, after a certain period of time, people no longer associate distinct meanings with the acronym’s letters, such as O, S, H, and A. In fact, there are probably very few people who even remember for what the letters stand. It is at such time that ‘acronyms’ become ‘words’ by definition. Much like FreddieMac and FannieMae. Does anyone remember for what the letters once stood?