Health and Safety Data Analysis

Is Back To School A High Risk To Your Safety Program

I was recently talking to a parent who was telling me all about her child going back to school this week. I quickly realized she has been thinking and preparing for this for a while. Gone are the “good old days” when you just handed your kids a backpack with what you thought it should have in it and a PB & J for lunch.

She had a list of required items that each student should have. A specific list of items that probably cost a pretty penny and good amount of time to get. Needless to say, her head was all around the concern of getting everything ready for her child and not her job tasks.

What does this have to do with your safety program? A lot, her mind was not on work, it was on all things that had to do to get her child back to school. Leaving these family concerns at the door is not an easy task and can be the source of distractions that cause injuries. Just as distracted drivers get into more vehicle accidents. Distracted employees get into more work related accidents.

To see if your work force is at risk consider the following:

- Look at your past data during the weeks of, before and after school starts. Do you see any additional incidents or large incidents?

- Talk to employees and see what’s on their mind. If you get story after story about going back to school and employees appear to be stressed out about it you might on your way to an injury.

- Review recent accidents and causes to see if there is a correlation.

Depending on your workforce you may or may not have an issue. If you do, consider taking action now and not waiting until you have injuries.

- Take the time to refocus employees by talking about what’s going on and how important it is to stay focused on safe work practices.

- Consider developing a short training course highlighting proactive steps employees can take to avoid injuries.

- Use the statistics you analyzed to put a short tool box talk together and have your supervisors review the information.

- Use a combination of methods to get the word out and change behavior. 

For for free safety links see http://theoshablog.com