Tag Archives: health and safety management software

Ladder Safety Rules 101: A Comprehensive Approach to Working Safely at Heights

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Falls are one of the leading causes of serious injury and death in the workplace, and OSHA is serious about preventing them. Four of the agency’s 10 most cited standards in 2023 were related to fall prevention, including the rules for ladder safety.

Graphic of construction workers on a ladder while constructing a building.

In 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 161 fatal work injuries from which ladders were the primary source. While this is a 5.8 percent decline from 171 deaths in 2019, it could be related to pandemic shutdowns and might not represent real progress.

Meanwhile, there were 22,710 nonfatal injuries related to ladder safety in 2020, which was a 1.7 percent increase from 22,330 injuries in 2019. These nonfatal ladder injuries resulted in at least one day away from work. Workers in installation, maintenance and repair occupations faced the highest number of ladder-related injuries, followed by construction and extraction occupations.

Ladder Safety Month… Read more...

OHS Research Needs to Focus on Why Incidents Don’t Happen

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Because a workplace injury may not have occurred yet is not an indication of safety or a predictor of future safety.

Traditional lines of questioning in occupational health and safety research may not always get to the heart of the matter when it comes to truly understanding what’s behind keeping workplaces safe.

Safety research and investigations typically focus on the dissection and analysis of incidents that occur, but not enough query may be examining why they don’t. Hazards are not things thrown into worksites, says Ron Gantt, a director and principal consultant for Reflect Consulting Group, a company that specializes in helping organizations improve their safety management.

“Hazards are unintended side effects of work,” he says. “If all we do is focus on the negative and are not understanding how it is all connected to everything else going on in a job site then we may inadvertently not be helping…we … Read more...

EHS Software Solves a Need for Speed for This Construction Company

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Moss searched for a safety management system and settled on the Intelex Health and Safety Management platform to organize all the data it had been collecting.
Moss went searching for a health and safety management system and settled on the Intelex Health and Safety Management platform to bring all its data from various processes into a centralized database, including incident reporting, inspections, behavioral-based observations, recorded near misses, good catches and even safety suggestions.

Fast growing companies often find themselves needing a high-performance approach to environmental health and safety (EHS).

Take the case of Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based construction company Moss & Associates, whose vice president of environmental health and safety, Scott Gerard, recently told the story of his company’s business growth. During a presentation at the 2021 EHS Today Safety Leadership Conference, Gerard said Moss started out as a company of 300 people some 17 years ago and has today become an organization of more than 3,000 employees with expectations to reach 6,000 this year.

But high growth often moves too quickly past other corporate capabilities. In … Read more...

Falls Top the OSHA Top 10 List of Safety Violations for More than a Decade

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OSHA revealed the Top 10 safety violations for fiscal year 2021 at the NSC Safety Congress & Expo and once again, falls top the list.
OSHA revealed the Top 10 safety violations for fiscal year 2021 at the NSC Safety
Congress & Expo and once again, falls top the list.

One of the most highly anticipated events at every NSC Safety Congress & Expo is the announcement of the list of top safety violations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). On Oct. 12, OSHA announced its preliminary Top 10 most frequently cited workplace safety standards for fiscal year 2021 and for the 11th year, falls topped the list.

Kevin Druley, the associate editor of Safety+Health magazine, introduced Patrick Kapust, deputy director of OSHA’s Directorate of Enforcement Programs, who presented the list virtually during the 2021 NSC Safety Congress & Expo, the world’s largest annual gathering of safety professionals.

Scott Gaddis, Vice President, Global Practice Leader – Safety and Health at Intelex Technologies Inc., joins David Wagner from Industrial Scientific to discuss “Why … Read more...

10 Tips to Prevent Workplace Injuries

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Each day, millions of workers head to manufacturing facilities, oil and gas refineries, mines, shipyards, airlines, food distribution hubs, farms, stores and more. Thousands of workers won’t return home from work.

Over 1 million work-related deaths occur annually, according to estimates from the International Labour Organisation and hundreds of millions of workers suffer from workplace injuries and occupational exposure to hazardous substances worldwide.

These fatal injuries and illnesses are emotionally and financially devastating for the workers and their families. For employers, the loss of an employee in a workplace incident results in the loss of a coworker and friend, in many cases, as well as possible citations and fines for violations of workplace safety and health standards, the cost of medical bills, lost productivity, workers’ compensation insurance increases and low morale among the workforce.

The best way to avoid these disruptions and costs is to eliminate workplace hazards. Read our … Read more...

The Top 7 Tips to Fight Workplace Fatigue

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While there is no one solution to fit everyone’s needs, here are some general strategies that workers and employers can use to manage workplace fatigue and work safely.

Long work hours and irregular work shifts are common in our society. Many workers around the world spend over 40 hours a week at work and hundreds of millions of people work full time on evening, night, rotating or other irregular shifts. Work schedules like these may cause workplace fatigue.

Shift workers may be scheduled to work days, evenings, nights and/or on a rotating or on-call basis. They may work extended shifts (more than 8 hours long), rotating or irregular shifts or consecutive shifts resulting in far more hours than what is considered a typical 40-hour work week. Long work hours and the fatigue associated with them can increase the risk of injuries and accidents and can contribute to poor overall health. … Read more...

The 5 Basic Principles of HOP (Human and Organizational Performance)

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Conversation is imperative for HOP and most critical to success. Active listening and learning (worker-to-worker and worker-to-management) is necessary to understand where failure and loss is possible.

Human and Organizational Performance systems, better known as HOP, have garnered much recent discussion and interest by many organizations, who see it as a better approach to improving safety performance. The premise of HOP is the idea that human error is inevitable so perhaps through better process systems management and analysis, organizations might lessen the effect of human error through the promotion of defenses that reduce risk.  

It is with this thinking that organizations can build management system robustness by understanding how workers perform their daily work tasks and then understanding what the gaps or errors are within the management system and close the gaps through what is commonly referred to as defenses. 

Conversation is imperative for HOP and most critical to success. Active listening and learning (worker-to-worker and worker-to-management) is necessary to understand where failure and loss is possible. It requires looking back at past events where loss was experienced, reviewing the present where errors are armed and ready to strike, and it’s an eye into the future to identify certain job tasks that promote the chance of loss.   

HOP is about experience and communication and seeks to understand the information gathered and insights … Read more...