ACCORDING to the National Fire Protection Association, an average of five fires break out per day at our nation's health care facilities1 and more than 8,000 hospital fires occur each year. If not acted upon quickly and effectively, the results can be catastrophic.
LOCKOUT/TAGOUT procedures specify the steps electricians must follow to remove power from an electrical circuit or panel and to lock out and tag the panel or circuit so no one can re-energize it while work is in progress. An increasing number of specialty contractors, ranging from health inspectors to thermographers, must work around electrical panels and exposed circuits.
For their own safety, these contractors and anyone else who may be exposed to li
TOXIC VOC exposure is one of the most overlooked hazards in confined space entry. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are organic compounds characterized by their tendency to evaporate easily at room temperature.
THE need to protect employees against air contamination in the workplace has become more critical than ever before.
"THE future is here to stay." In terms of safety training, this saying refers to the use and proliferation of Internet-based courseware for delivering training messages, as well as Internet-based software for administering and managing those messages.
THE anthrax incident of 2001 was a small bioterrorism attack in terms of the amount of agent used (the letter addressed to Senator Daschle contained only two to three ounces of anthrax spores, and the other letters contained similar amounts) and the resulting morbidity and mortality. (There were only 22 cases of anthrax and five deaths).
ADEQUATE preparation surely is the answer to many of life's challenges and dangers. It is well established that prevention's value outweighs the cost of incidents themselves (for example, the UK Department for Transport has calculated that the total value of preventing the 229,014 highway accidents in Great Britain in 2001, of which 3,176 were fatal accidents and 31,588 were serious accidents, would have been roughly $31 billion, or about $135,000 per accident).
HOW to prevent eye, face, and head injuries isn't a mystery. But knowing how to protect yourself or your workers does take some analysis, attention, effort, and money. Wearing inadequate protection or none at all is not an alternative if the hazards involved in a given task cannot be eliminated, engineered out, or solved through administrative controls.
FIRE, jolts, arcs, thermal burns, flash burns . . . . There are few workplace scenarios as potentially deadly as those that involve work with electricity or electrical items. Yet we all have a tendency to overlook the most basic of hazards in the workplace, too.
ARE you capitalizing on the benefits of the Internet to boost employee training?
AUTOMATED external defibrillators are becoming increasingly common in workplaces and public facilities across the nation.
ONE doesn't normally think about water conservation during an emergency. A fire, for example, needs to be contained and extinguished as quickly as possible. And that usually means using copious amounts of water.
LIKE a lot of us, the people who routinely cut open boxes in stores, restaurants, warehouses, and health care facilities are creatures of habit. Many of them don't welcome a new cutting tool.
MANKIND has continuously searched for and found evolving means for survival. Gas monitoring instrumentation has been a part of that evolution. In the span of the last 200+ years, the act of monitoring a worker's environment for explosive and toxic gases, as well as for oxygen enrichment or deficiency, has seen a tremendous evolution.
IT was a normal work day for J.D. Buske. With the blink of an eye, all of that changed. He almost became one of the one thousand daily eye injury statistics reported in the United States. Here's his story: "Hello, my name is J.D., and I live in San Antonio, Texas. Today your product saved my right eye and prevented me from serious injury to my face. Let me explain what happened.
THE technology available in today's auto-darkening welding helmets was the stuff of science fiction to welders 30 years ago. A single lens capable of darkening automatically to a variable, preset shade level the instant an arc is struck would have sounded about as realistic as a "Star Trek"-style "transporter" or a cell phone that can take pictures.
THE National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health publishes the NIOSH Manual of Analytical Methods (NMAM), a primary reference that has been a reliable source of analytical methods used in occupational health laboratories throughout the world for more than 25 years.