DURING the past few years, safety professionals worldwide have been observing the developments in CD-ROM and online training courseware. The advantages of training with these formats are numerous.
Editor's note: Ambassador Medical Services Inc. of Marlton, N.J., a third-party administrator of federally required testing programs, has seen its business shift from 100 percent DOT testing at startup in 1988 to a 40 percent DOT/60 percent non-DOT mix today.
YOU can increase productivity and reduce downtime in your plant by applying a systematic facility identification program. If you think this is an expensive proposition, the alternative--downtime, errors, and injuries--can be much more costly. You realize cost benefits through a reduction in process and production errors and fewer lost time accidents.
BREAKING down language barriers is critical to maintaining a safe work environment. Why the concern? As the number of employees with English as a Second Language (ESL) has increased over the past decade, the number of workplace injuries has risen disproportionately.
YOU must start thinking safety early. One of the most frequent mistakes system designers make is thinking only of the production process and ignoring the fact that the system will be safeguarded later to prevent injury, before it is put into productive use.
WE'RE entering the season when OSHA wants employers to pay special attention to heat-related illnesses. Managers should know the symptoms and take quick action when heat-related problems occur.
THERMAL imagers (TIs) are sweeping through the North American fire service as more and more municipal fire departments adopt the technology. The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently reported approximately 25 percent of municipal fire departments have TIs.
IN 2001, at an exotic animal ranch in Florida, a 550-pound crossbred Siberian tiger mauled to death a 49-year-old volunteer worker. According to the Associated Press, the worker was attempting to qualify for his own license to keep "big cats" when the tiger broke through a chain link, grabbed the worker by the neck, and pulled him to the ground. The official report of the incident said the man died in seconds of a broken neck.
Editor's note: Ambassador Medical Services Inc. of Marlton, N.J., a third-party administrator of federally required testing programs, has seen its business shift from 100 percent DOT testing at startup in 1988 to a 40 percent DOT/60 percent non-DOT mix today.
THE American public buys more than five billion over-the-counter drug products each year. A June 2003 national survey examining use of OTC medications indicated more of us are reading labels and checking out possible side effects, but we still have far to go, the National Council on Patient Information and Education noted last fall when it launched its latest consumer education campaign, "Be MedWise Prescription for Taking OTC Medicines."
IN the world of occupational heat stress, including professional sports such as American football, employers and employees must find some accommodation between reasonable productivity and reasonable heat stress illness prevention.
ARE you in charge of creating a lockout/tagout (LOTO) program for your company? If so, beyond being familiar with the standard, you must fully understand the process of creating and implementing a successful LOTO program that will ultimately save time, injuries, and possibly lives.
THE hard hat has become the symbol of the construction industry. With this widely supported "branding" of construction as a safety-conscious industry came substantive reductions in injuries and illnesses--a 47 percent reduction, from 15.3 per hundred full-time construction workers in 1976 to 7.9 in 2001, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
FOLLOWING Sept. 11, 2001 the question "How safe are we?" has entered our minds repeatedly. Previously, the idea of a potential terrorist attack included the use of weapons used in warfare or homemade bombs, such as in the first WTC attack.
LARGE industrial and stationary back-up batteries are used to "store" electrical power. The sudden and unplanned release of their direct current (DC) electricity can cause problems ranging from electric shock to battery fires or explosions.
VIOLENCE has emerged as an important safety and health issue in today's workplaces. Homicide, its most extreme form, is the second-leading cause of fatal occupational injuries in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 709 workplace homicides occurred in 1998, accounting for 12 percent of the total 6,026 fatal work injuries in the United States.
ACCIDENT Intervention Systems, as the term pertains to safety in industrial, manufacturing, and distribution facilities, is defined as: A systems approach to in-plant safety, where the three areas of Risk Management--People Protection, Property Protection and Code Compliance--are assessed and proper procedure is taken to neutralize workplace hazards and improve code compliance.
HAS your organization hit a plateau in safety? Are you looking for ways to improve the safe performance of your people? Performance Safety provides effective solutions with optimal participation from your employees.
ALL or nothing: This is what lockout/tagout (29 CFR 1910.147 in the OSHA catalogue) comes down to. "You"--with a gesture indicating the newbies as well as the old hands at work, because you cannot cut any slack for experience--"you are in, or you're out. You are with us, or you're against us. There's no middle ground."
IMPLEMENTING lockout/tagout on a machine is relatively simple: Just identify all of the energy sources, isolate the energy sources by turning off and or blocking or bleeding them, lock and tag the energy sources, verify it is locked out, and then do the work that needs to be done.