Intelex Exhibits at Partners In Prevention 2013 Conference

Posted on April 30, 2013 by JP Nadeau

The Partners in Prevention 2013 Health & Safety Conference & Trade Show is Canada’s largest health and safety event and the flagship of the Partners in Prevention Conference Series.

The conference sees more than 4,500 health and safety professionals from every sector come together to gain access to best practices, compliance advice and business solutions through over 60 interactive sessions, workshops and professional development courses. Over 400 exhibitors display products and services in the Trade Show portion of the conference where Intelex’s Jeremy Mawson and Ethan Fleming-Cushing are manning the Intelex booth and showcasing Intelex’s safety management software solutions.

To learn more about the Partners in Prevention 2013 conference visit the website here. or follow the action on Twitter with the hashtag #PIP_Conf.

Intelex Exhibits at Partners In Prevention 2013 Conference

OSHA poised to call for better tracking of temporary workers

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

According to a new OSHA memo released only a day after this past Sunday’s annual Workers’ Memorial Day, the agency is launching an initiative to better track the exposure of temporary workers to health and safety hazards. Recognizing a recent pattern of high-profile fatal accidents and the sheer volume of temporary employees in the U.S. workforce, OSHA hopes this new requirement will enable it to better protect foreign workers.

The move follows the recent death of a temporary worker on his first day of the job. Many temporary workers don’t have a strong proficiency with the English language and receive poor health and safety training.

“Employers have a duty to provide necessary safety and health training to all workers regarding workplace hazards,” the memo noted. “Recent inspections have indicated problems where temporary workers have not been trained and were not protected from serious workplace hazards due to lack of personal protective equipment when working with hazardous chemicals and lack of lockout/tagout protections, among others.”

According to the new memo, OSHA will require employers to tracking certain information during inspections and investigate worksites where temporary workers are employed. To capture this information, the agency created a new code for temporary workers, and if a Compliance Safety and Health Officer (CSHO) notices that temporary employees are exposed to dangerous or ‘violiative’ conditions, they have to enter a new code in the tracking system.

Check out the memo here.

OSHA poised to call for better tracking of temporary workers

Workers’ Memorial Day recognized around the world

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

Today is Workers’ Memorial Day, one of the biggest days in workplace health and safety, and there will be events around the world (and most likely right in your own community) honouring workers killed, disabled, injured or harmed at work.

As we know, every day 12 American workers go to work and never come home as a result of workplace fatalities. On a global level, as we learned once again from the tragic situation in Dhaka, Bangladesh reminds us, the statistics are disheartening. Basically, someone dies on the job every 15 seconds. That’s more people dying at work than fighting wars.

And as EHS Today points out, the National Council for Safety and Health (National COSH) has released a report in advance of Worker’s Memorial Day. The document links personal stories of workplace tragedy with data on government health and safety statistics to highlight the need for us all to work harder to avoid preventable workplace fatalities.

So today is a great opportunity to take pause and consider what you can do to improve the health and safety conditions of your workplace and to remember those who have been killed or injured at work in the past year.

(Pictured: Amicus Workers Memorial Tree, with floral tributes, Astley Park, Chorley, Lancashire by Joshthetree.)

Workers’ Memorial Day recognized around the world

Mobility and construction: making better decisions

Posted on April 17, 2013 by James Coulen

In today’s day and age, technology is the key to profitable project management. Mobile devices and construction software have been developed to improve operational efficiencies not only in the office but in the field as well. Contractors who have implemented software to perform inspections, replacing spreadsheets, have noticed a positive difference to their bottom line. Mobile devices are now becoming much more accessible and affordable and allow the construction industry to become more efficient, see value into true numbers, and gain the ability to find a profit in every job.

In recent years, Construction businesses have witnessed a theme showing the important lessons come from companies enduring challenges and being pushed to their limits. Since then business owners have realized survival of the fittest is not determined by being the most well-known name in the market or simply just doing the best work. Rather, it is management through efficiency.

Efficiency in the Field

Having an all-in-one construction management software brings all critical business applications within one system that can be used for any and all team members. Having systems tailored to unique contractor needs provides familiarity and ease of use. Having these solutions on Mobile devices will constantly improve productivity, increase real-time communication, provide accurate insight into their projects and activities to maximize profitability. For example, having an iPad application with access to construction safety management software will allow contractors to access valuable information (such as plans, forms, change orders, employee information, scheduling, etc.) With this information, contractors can easily track all information related to any project and can better align themselves for all aspects of the job from beginning to end.

No more binders, loose papers, job folders, time consuming challenges like looking up information or sharing project details and updating data.

Additionally, implementing this technology on mobile devices means Project Managers can use existing checklists built into their systems to perform their scheduled audits or inspections tracking all information in real time. By allowing this, contractors put more time back on the clock and project managers can use extra time to do more profit-boosting work.

Remote Reporting

How about reporting? The struggle of keeping information updated will be eliminated. With construction safety management software you can easily record daily record activities, capture data for any job site such as labor or equipment use and have real time visibility into this information. This log can help for any audit trail needed, explaining scheduling delays, protecting against back charges, justifying change orders or in worse case scenarios, it can serve as legal documents. It can also provide valuable information in real time for executives.

Owners need to measure their efforts project over project to see where they can improve. Investing is construction management solutions will allow to control all critical business operations, enabling more efficiency and profitable results through the whole project life cycle, all the while gaining competitive edge. Contractors using Mobile devices set new standards for project execution, since they facilitate rapid response times to any issues and allow for confident business decision making. With these systems and tools being easy to use, the power is in the hands of the construction business owner.

Distracted Driving Kills: Find Out What You Can Do As An Employer

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Alison Grenkie

The National Safety Council (NSC) is promoting awareness of the consequences of distracted driving this month with slogans such as “Hands-Free Is Not Risk-Free” and “On the Road, Off the Phone.”

April was formally introduced to the United States as Distracted Driving Awareness Month back in 2010. There have been initiatives across Canada as well, including an RCMP campaign launched in British Columbia this past February. Yet wherever you are and whatever month you choose to review the statistics, they aren’t good. So what can we do, as individuals and employers, to reduce distracted driving?

Understand the Risk

At the time of writing the National Safety Council estimates that in this year alone 325,389 crashes in the United States have involved drivers using cell phones and texting. To put it another way, one crash approximately every 24 seconds.

Texting while driving increases the risk of a crash by 23 times, according to a study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. In British Columbia nearly one in three deaths are linked to distracted driving.

As the National Safety Council reminds us, distractions can come in many forms: even if your hands are on the wheel and your eyes are on the road, your brain is still distracted by a hands-free cell phone.

Change Public Opinion

Janet Froetscher, president and CEO of the National Safety Council, is one of the more prominent supporters of Distracted Driving Awareness month. However, creating awareness is just the first step. “While many understand the dangers, they still use their cell phones when they drive,” she points out.

Many safety advocates argue that drinking and driving was once socially acceptable as well, and they are hoping to eventually see the same shift in public opinion for using cell phones while driving.

“It’s time to start changing the social acceptance of cell phone use while driving,” said Froetscher.

Create A Safety Policy

Employers who want to protect their employees’ safety and encourage them to remain distraction-free while on the job should consider creating a cell phone policy.

Even workers who aren’t driving can benefit from this policy – a few years ago a construction worker in New Brunswick was so distracted on his cell phone that he stepped right in front of a truck and was seriously injured. Similar to jewelry (often banned in industrial workplaces), cell phones can get in the way or interfere with the proper use of personal protective equipment. Think of a worker removing his safety gloves so he can send a text. These are just a few more examples of how cell phone use has the potential to result in a workplace safety incident.

Interested employers can download the free NSC cell phone policy kit here.

Making a formal commitment to an initiative strengthens a person’s resolve to stick to their word. You can also encourage employees to take the NSC pledge to drive cell free at nsc.org/pledge.

Drive safely everyone!

The 80-20 inversion: how we waste time and money when we don’t have automated systems

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

Tracking and analyzing near-misses and at-risk behaviours should be central to any preventive health and safety management system. In 2003 ConocoPhillips Marine conducted a study that indicated that for every workplace fatality, there were at least 300,000 at-risk behaviours – basically, activities inconsistent with health and safety rules – and about 3,000 near misses. This applies across organizations of any size and is the basis of the classic Safety Pyramid. And the same essential dynamic also applies in any Quality Management System (QMS), except instead of lost time and fatalities, we’re looking at defects, recalls, rework, and huge brand damage. However, too often businesses fail to track recordable injuries, lost time and fatalities, and in the QMS sphere they fail to track the same kinds of proactive data.

But tracking near misses, at-risk behaviours, and potential quality issues can be a challenging and exhaustive task for any business, especially when a health and safety program is based on paper documents or disparate, siloed software systems, like spreadsheet programs, word processors, and shared network drives.

Organizations that leverage proven, web-based health and safety software solutions, conversely, benefit from the 80-20 inversion, a dynamic that unlocks frozen time and resources and fosters a greater capacity to track and manage at-risk behaviors and near misses, thereby reducing illnesses, minimizing injuries, saving lives and, quite critically, minimizing costs. Working with standard tools, safety and quality personnel on average spend 80% of their time and resources on data collection and only 20% of time and resources assessing that data. The latter part is key, given only thorough analysis will help health and safety experts identify trends and proactively minimize hazards.

Companies that shift to a robust, streamlined EHS or quality management solution move to 20% data collection and 80% assessment and prevention. With such systems, data only has to be entered into the system only once in a web form, freeing time and resources to analyze data, identify trends, and implement preventive activities and mechanisms. The net benefit is more time spent on analysis, evaluation, and implementing corrective/preventive actions.

This is, quite simply, the core of a proactive EHS/Quality management system and what every organization ought to be doing to minimize the impact on their bottom lines.

Workers Compensation – The Small Picture: Attitude, behaviour and culture more dangerous than unsafe conditions

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Robert Smith

This is the third in a three-part blog series on the relationship between workplace culture and the costs associated with occupational injury and illness.

We’ve talked about the relationship between the employer-employee…well, relationship and we’ve talked about impacts on claims, costs and workers compensation. In the story I shared last week, we learned how some of the more ineffable qualities of workplace culture have a significant relationship with employee engagement and therefore absenteeism and direct/indirect costs.

This is a relationship that information from Health and Safety authorities tends to support. For example, Health & Safety Ontario’s excellent resource, Journey to Excellence: The Complete Guide, emphasizes the impact of organizational culture on health and safety.

The guide notes that hard stats that clearly relate injury rates to organizational culture can be difficult to establish. In large part this is because most companies only report superficial causes (for example, lack of machine guarding) and fail to report on true root causes, such as an organizational culture issue that might explain why employees aren’t using machine guards. According to the guide, workplace safety researcher Dr. William Selkirk believes that a staggering 90% of workplace injuries are rooted in attitude, behaviour, and culture rather than unsafe working conditions.

In terms of this relationship between organizational culture and injury rates/health and safety performance, the guide explains that there are two key perspectives to consider:

Health and safety culture metrics that are linked to health and safety outcomes.
Indicators of culture linked to employee engagement, which in turn affects health and safety outcomes.

According to researchers cited in the guide, there are four key health and safety indicators linked to safety outcomes:

A top-level (C-suite) commitment to safety.
Realistic, flexible customs and practices for handling hazards.
Continuous organizational learning through things like feedback, monitoring and analysis.
A “care and concern” for hazards across all levels of the workforce.

While none should be earth shattering, since the problems presented here are constantly repeated by various organizations (see Avi’s post yesterday on a health and safety study that illustrates this perfectly) coupled with the fact the issue remains a prime reason for lost-time in the workplace, it is important to focus our energy on the big and small pictures to improve safety culture, minimize injuries, incidents, illnesses and lost time, and to ultimately reduce costs and save lives.

Robert Smith is an injury management, human resource and disability management expert with decades of experience in the field, including years within Ontario’s WSIB.

Workers’ Compensation – The Small Picture: what’s your claims nightmare?

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Robert Smith

This is the second in a three-part blog series on the relationship between workplace culture and the costs associated with occupational injury and illness.

If you have been involved in workers’ compensation claims with your organization, I am pretty sure you have at least one horror story. Unfortunately it isn’t the just the horror story that needs attention. A couple of years ago I was working with a medium-sized Ontario manufacturer and was reviewing their Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) New Experimental Experience Rating (NEER) quarterly statements and was asking questions regarding all their lost-time claims. Few were outstanding in terms of costs or duration but as I went through them, one stood out as we discussed the circumstances.

The employee was a long-term worker with over seventeen years of uninterrupted service and an excellent work record. She had a couple of health care-only claims but this one was a three-week lost-time claim. The story was she had come in to work as normal on the Monday morning but as she was leaving at 3 p.m. she told her supervisor she had ‘hurt her back’ at 9:30 in the morning. The following day she called in and told the employer her doctor had ordered her off work for two weeks. She also brought in a doctor’s note. The company diligently completed and submitted the Form 7 (Ontario WSIB Report of Injury) as well as conducted an accident investigation. They also offered ‘modified’ duties which the employee’s doctor felt was ‘too soon.’ After the second week a second note authorizing a further week off was presented and the employer contacted the WSIB to facilitate a return to work. By the end of the week the employee returned to the modified work with doctor’s permission.

Now while the costs and duration of this claim were not significant, the story itself is. First of all the Monday that the incident occurred happened to be the first day of March Break and all the schools were closed for that week. When we checked, we found the employee had five school-age children. While her mother normally took care of them, when we spoke to her supervisor, he recalled a discussion wherein she told him that her mother and father had taken a two week trip to Portugal starting the week of March Break.

While the employee may not have intentionally faked the injury to look after her family, when the opportunity to be off and take care of her children, there was little direct intervention to offer alternatives. Of course her responsibility was to communicate appropriately but the level of engagement and commitment was less than desired despite a seventeen-year good-work record.

What’s your lost-time or workers’ compensation nightmare? Tell us in the comments section below.

Robert Smith is an injury management, human resource and disability management expert with decades of experience in the field, including years within Ontario’s WSIB.

Workers are still dying from carbon monoxide exposure

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

OSHA is currently reminding employers to protect their employees from the serious effects of carbon monoxide exposure. This is in the wake of a New England worker who was found unconscious near his workstation, experiencing seizures as a result of carbon monoxide exposure. Within days, a number of other workers at the site became sick as well.

What did the investigation show? All the windows and doors in the facility were closed tightly to conserve heat in the face of winter temperatures, but the real problem was the lack of any sort of exhaust ventilation, and this was a site with a lot of combustion mechanisms indoors — a sure fire recipe for carbon monoxide exposure.

It seems like it ought to be an archaic problem, but every year workers die on the job as a result of carbon monoxide exposure. And it is particularly bad in winter when, as with the example above, many employers seal windows and close doors to keep the cold out.

Some common examples of carbon monoxide sources include things as simple as power tools, space heaters and furnaces, to more heavyweight equipment like gas generators, compressors, and welding equipment. So even though you may not operate within a heavy manufacturing environment, there is still a chance you and your employees can be exposed to carbon monoxide.

That’s why OSHA is asking employers to install an effective ventilation system, avoid the use of fuel-burning equipment in enclosed or even partially-enclosed spaces, and (quite logically) to install carbon monoxide detectors in areas of concern.

For complete tips on mitigating risk associated with carbon monoxide exposure, check out OSHA’s Carbon Monoxide Fact Sheet.

Top 5 Farm Safety Tips just in time for Canadian Agricultural Safety Week

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

Farm safety is a serious concern. Between hazardous farm equipment and sometimes erratic livestock, our frontline producers live in a very dangerous world. However, while farms are one of the most risky places to work, farm safety doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. That’s part of the reason the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association (CASA) is currently facilitating the 2013 Canadian Agricultural Safety Week.

It’s worth highlighting the vast importance of safety in this hazardous field. After all, though 85% of producers say that safety is a priority on their farms, less than 10% actually have a documented safety plan onsite, according to the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.

Also, we have to consider the fact that while farms do rely on a lot of transient, seasonal help, the nucleus of operations on farms is often represented by a tightly knit family. So while occupational injury and illness is never a good thing, it is even more problematic – emotionally, financially – to the families themselves when health and safety is compromised. But that should also be a great excuse to ratchet up the approach to safety.

So, with all this in mind, it’s worth taking a look at the top five agricultural safety tips:

Get with the plan! A key focus of Canadian Agricultural Safety Week 2013 is the need for farms to develop documented health and safety plans. As mentioned, not many farms actually have these, but they’re an essential requirement of doing business. And they really don’t have to be complicated. They just have to cover all the bases and, critically, they have to actually be followed. But if you don’t have one, get one. The Canadian Agricultural Safety Association (CASA) has made it really easy: they’ve provided a free plan outline with explicit instructions on what you need to include in your plan.
On the road: If you have to drive equipment off the farm and on the roads, remember to be exceptionally cautious. Make sure your vehicle has all the proper lighting equipment, and never drive on public roads in the dark.
Take charge of your tools: Any farm needs a ton of tools on hand to get an array of different jobs done, but in addition to ensuring the tools are used safely, we need to be vigilant about ensuring they are properly stored and maintained. Ensure power tools are unplugged when not in use, and properly grounded. Also, be proactive about maintaining all tools according to manufacturer guidelines. Set up a calendar with a yearly maintenance schedule, and keep a documented, up-to-date inventory of all of the tools on your farm.
Watch the kids: The often untold story of farm safety has less to do with the workers themselves, and more to do with kids. As family-centric operations, farms will have young children around much of the time. Unfortunately, the number of child deaths on farms in Canada and around the world is staggering. Between 1990 and 2008, almost 250 children under 15 years of age were killed in Canadian agricultural incidents. The biggest threats are getting run over by a machine, drowning, machine rollovers, and animal-related incidents. So be extra-vigilant when it comes to child safety and always know where all kids are at all times. Install fencing around ponds and streams, and ensure everyone onsite knows to keep kids away from the machinery!
Respect the livestock: Farmers spend years building up relationships of mutual trust with their horses, cattle, pigs and other livestock. But remember, no matter how confident you feel with your animal friends, animals can be erratic creatures. Ensure you always have a clear escape route, ideally with multiple escape options, when working with livestock. Wear appropriate clothing and protective equipment including gloves and strong boots.

Head over to CASA’s website for more information, and track #casw on Twitter to get the latest on what’s happening during Canadian Agricultural Safety Week.