Safety Professionals Handbook to Debut at Safety 2008
The ASSE Safety Professionals Handbook will be making its debut at Safety 2008 in Las Vegas. Editor-in-Chief Joel M. Haight says the book is "the culmination of about eight years of the hard work and patience of many people.... I believe we have created an incredible contribution to the safety profession's body of knowledge."
ASSE's Council on Professional Development developed the book's concept and devised its table of contents, which includes 12 topic areas and an organizational breakdown within each topic area to include a chapter on regulatory issues, applied science and engineering principles, cost analysis and budgeting, benchmarking and performance measurement, and best practices. Topic areas cover many traditional areas of safety and health such as emergency response, ergonomics, risk assessment and hazard control, engineering management, fleet safety, industrial hygiene, environmental management, worker's compensation, fire prevention and protection, PPE, HazCom, and training. The book also includes sections on equations, common calculations, conversions, constants, and similar resource material.
All of ASSE's 13 practice specialties were solicited for interested and qualified authors. In an interview in the April issue of Professional Safety magazine, Haight says his editorial team received about 200 resumes from potential authors and pared that number down to write the book's nearly 80 chapters. In all, he added, the authors "cumulatively have nearly 2,000 years of work experience," representing "a good mix of industry and academic professionals, as well as a good mix of people from around the country and from many types of industries, and academic and research institutions.
"The review and revision process has taken the longest," he added. "This was a rigorous process and as a volunteer project, we had to compete with all of our authors' work schedules and priorities. We just finished up this work in February of this year."
Haight describes the handbook as "a collection and a summary of what is known about each of the 12 topic areas. The content is well-known, well-established, time-honored material that represents accepted practice and knowledge in the safety field. It has a bit of the feel of an encyclopedia, but with more of a story and filled with applied and real examples of the points made."
During Safety 2008, ASSE will host a special reception for the contributing authors, all of whom will receive a copy of the finished product for the first time; otherwise, the book will be available for purchase. The reception will be at the Las Vegas Hilton, Conference Room #10, from 5:45 to 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, June 10.