Risk Management – Page 9 – Risk Management 365

Keep Employees Safe with an Effective Safety and Health Management System

There are five major elements of an effective SHMS:

a) Management Commitment and Planning – Top management must provide visible ongoing commitment and leadership for implementing the SHMS covering all workers, including contract workers.

b) Employee Involvement – The best SHMSs involve employees at every level of the organization. Employees are often those closest to the hazard and have first-hand knowledge of workplace hazards.

c) Worksite Analysis – Worksite Analysis is a comprehensive evaluation of the hazards and potential hazards in your workplace.

d) Hazard Prevention and Control – Effective management actively establishes procedures for timely identification, correction, and control of hazards. Once hazards and potential hazards are recognized, a hazard prevention and control program can be designed.

e) Safety and Health Training – Training is the means to help assure employees and management understand safety and health hazards in the workplace and know how to protect themselves and others from the hazards while doing their job.

OSHA Top 10 Most Cited Standards

The following is a list of the top 10 most frequently cited standards* following inspections of worksites by federal OSHA. OSHA publishes this list to alert employers about these commonly cited standards so they can take steps to find and fix recognized hazards addressed in these and other standards before OSHA shows up. Far too many preventable injuries and illnesses occur in the workplace.

1926.501 – Fall Protection
1910.1200 – Hazard Communication
1926.451 – Scaffolding
1910.134 – Respiratory Protection
1910.305 – Electrical, Wiring Methods
1910.178 – Powered Industrial Trucks
1926.1053 – Ladders
1910.147 – Lockout/Tagout
1910.303 – Electrical, General Requirements
1910.212 – Machine Guarding

via Top Ten Standards.

Lean Thinking for Employee Health & Safety

Most people associate the term Lean with the Toyota Production System. This combined management and production system helped a small company grow to world-class size and market share. As they did so, most of the auto manufacturers and other industries studied their methods and tools to learn how to improve their own organizations. What does this method of lean thinking have to do with employee health & safety? Here are a few examples:

Integrates employee safety health and well-being into the business
Marries waste elimination (injury and illness) to making $$ in non traditional way
Simple and easy for supervision and employees to think and apply lean tools –Hands on experiential learning
Builds culture of critical thinking – It’s not “what” you do but “how” and “why”

You can trace the roots of Lean back many years but there are still many companies that have not fully implemented it. They are missing a huge opportunity to improve their business and even their long term survival.

The Effect of Poor Health on Workers Compensation Costs

A driver of workers compensation medical costs lies in the number of comorbid factors—diseases or disorders that exist simultaneously, but independently, with another disorder—that injured workers may have that make it more difficult to recover from work injuries. These conditions include systemic problems, such as hypertension, obesity or diabetes. Often, injured workers who have been out of work for a long period of time have lost their medical insurance because their employers can no longer carry them on the books as employees. This lack of insurance makes it difficult for them to afford prescriptions for any of these underlying systemic conditions. These untreated medical conditions then slow recovery from the work injury, which leads to higher costs for the workers compensation carrier.

via National Trends in Workers Compensation | Risk Management.

Be Prepared for Sudden Cardiac Arrest at Work

Reasons for AEDs in the workplace

Workers may suffer sudden cardiac arrest while on the job.
Onsite AEDs save precious treatment time, and can improve survival odds because they can be used before emergency medical service (EMS) personnel arrive.
A heart rhythm in ventricular fibrillation may only be restored to normal by an electric shock.
The AED is compact, lightweight, portable, battery operated, safe, and easy to use.

via Saving Sudden Cardiac Arrest Victims in the Workplace.

OSHA Employer Responsibilities to Protect Employees

Employers have the responsibility to provide a safe workplace. Employers MUST provide their employees with a workplace that does not have serious hazards and follow all relevant OSHA safety and health standards. Employers must find and correct safety and health problems. OSHA further requires employers to try to eliminate or reduce hazards first by making changes in working conditions rather than just relying on masks, gloves, ear plugs or other types of personal protective equipment (PPE). Switching to safer chemicals, enclosing processes to trap harmful fumes, or using ventilation systems to clean the air are examples of effective ways to get rid of or minimize risks.

Employers MUST also:

Inform employees about hazards through training, labels, alarms, color-coded systems, chemical information sheets and other methods.
Keep accurate records of work-related injuries and illnesses.
Perform tests in the workplace, such as air sampling required by some OSHA standards.
Provide hearing exams or other medical tests required by OSHA standards.
Post OSHA citations, injury and illness data, and the OSHA poster in the workplace where workers will see them.
Notify OSHA within 8 hours of a workplace incident in which there is a death or when three or more workers go to a hospital.
Not discriminate or retaliate against a worker for using their rights under the law.

via Workers.

Avoid Slips, Trips, and Falls at Work

Slips, trips, and falls constitute the majority of general industry accidents. They cause 15% of all accidental deaths, and are second only to motor vehicles as a cause of fatalities. The OSHA standards for walking/working surfaces apply to all permanent places of employment, except where only domestic, mining, or agricultural work is performed.

Walking/working surfaces are addressed in specific standards for the general industry, shipyard employment, marine terminals, longshoring, and the construction industry.

via Safety and Health Topics | Walking/Working Surfaces.

Back Injuries and Workers’ Comp

Back injuries have a bad reputation. “The workman looks upon them with apprehension, the insurance company with doubt, the medical examiner with suspicion, the lawyer with uncertainty, and the court with as open a mind as is possible under the circumstances….”

This statement was written in 1917. Not much has changed since then.

via JAMA Network | JAMA | Back Injuries and Their Significance Under the Workmen’s Compensation and Other Acts..

How to Recognize Workers’ Comp Fraud

Workers’ Comp Claimant fraud–when an employee deliberately falsifies facts about an illness or injury to collect benefits–is the most commonly discussed form of workers’ comp fraud. Here are a few examples of how to recognize this type of fraud:

An employee becomes injured or sick and claims that it was caused by work-related circumstances when, in reality, it was not.
An employee experiences a minor accident and exaggerates the extent of the resulting injury.
An employee who has an injury claim collects benefits while secretly continuing to work or consciously participates in activities that otherwise would not be possible based on the extent of the reported injury and medical limitations.
A claimant with a legitimate injury or illness, who is capable of transitional work or modified duty, malingers and makes no effort to return to any work activity, all the while receiving workers’ compensation benefits.

via Louisiana Workers’ Compensation Corporation.

Importance of Safety Training

Routine work can dull alertness and a relaxed attitude can replace the caution that existed when the job was new and interesting. In many jobs the same route is traveled daily over the same roads or the same tasks are repeated with little conscious thought. Without some periodic reawakening to the ever-present hazards, lethargy deepens and the odds of an accident occurring can increase.

Workers may not always recognize the importance of safety training or think of it as unnecessary because they’ve “been doing it for years.” But an important benefit of periodic safety training is the reminder that a danger can exist and the no one is immune to accidents. Therefore, it is important for workers to understand the purpose of the training session, why it will be useful to them, and what can result from not following safety rules and procedures.

via Importance of Safety Training.