samedi 19 octobre 2013

Using Personal Protective Equipment Like Hard Hats Save Lives

By Elena McDowell


Most employees conclude that the safety staff is responsible for preventing damage, injury or death from occurring in the workspace, though that would logically require prescience. Instead, safety professionals provide risk identification so that protective policies, procedures and equipment can be put in place. The most successful example in the history of the industrial age is venerable construction hard hats.

An unusual characteristic of people is that when first introduced to a new environment, they assess the physical layout and anomalies practically jump out at them, though they are reluctant to identify them. Once a part of the company or organization, they walk past these same problems day after day, and they become invisible. This is the normal way people process and accommodate environments, but it complicates the effort to identify and remove hazards.

No matter how vigilant, inspections can not find all the conditions in a work environment that can be dangerous to workers. The people who work in the area of a hazard have usually already assimilated the condition into their environment and no longer perceive it as a hazard. For this reason, real answers to not get put in place until after an accident has occurred.

Blood priority is how safety professionals describe the process of incremental introduction of safeguards piece by piece as the situations cause damage, injury or death. The problem is that in the absence of an accident, efforts to increase safety fall on deaf ears. For those things already in place, safety staff have to remind workers why the protective policy or equipment was introduced to gain compliance.

Human nature has a deeply ingrained belief that when it comes to accidents and misfortune, it might happen to others, but is unlikely to affect someone here. There is, in no small part, a general belief that those who become the victim of a workplace mishap did something wrong. It is a notion that common sense will prevent accidents, and those who experience them are somehow incompetent.

Reality bears proof that this is simply not the case, there is no evidence that any significant proportion of injured workers are incompetent or careless. Injuries happen to all manner of employee, because they are all human and are susceptible to the most dangerous of things--distraction. Anything that causes a distraction or alters the normal pattern of behavior can result in an injury.

At one time or another, everyone gets distracted, whether it is something in their home life, a bad experience or even illness. Because of this the airline industry takes special precautions, since a single mistake can be catastrophic. They use multiple pilots to crew an aircraft, and every phase of flight is run by checklist.

Over time most occupations have been analyzed and appropriate procedures put in place, and in addition personal protective gear has been developed for extra protection. But many employees find this equipment tedious and unnecessary and do not use it. The gold standard for such personal protective equipment overcame all forms of resistance and became a symbol of respected work on construction sites; hard hats.




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