Accident prevention
There also are two slightly different meanings of safety. For example, home safety may indicate a building's ability to protect against external harm events (such as weather, home invasion, etc.), or may indicate that its internal installations (such as appliances, stairs, etc.) are safe (not dangerous or harmful) for its inhabitants.
Limitations
Safety can be limited in relation to some guarantee or a standard of insurance to the quality and unharmful function of an object or organization. It is used in order to ensure that the object or organization will do only what it is meant to do.
It is important to realize that safety is relative. Eliminating all risk, if even possible, would be extremely difficult and very expensive. A safe situation is one where risks of injury or property damage are low and manageable.
Types of safety
It is important to distinguish between products that meet standards, that are safe, and those that merely feel safe. The highway safety community uses these terms:
Normative safety
Normative safety is a term used to describe products or designs that meet applicable design standards.
Substantive safety
Substantive, or objective safety means that the real-world safety history is favorable, whether or not standards are met
Perceived safety
Perceived, or subjective safety refers to the level of comfort of users. For example, traffic signals are perceived as safe, yet under some circumstances, they can increase traffic crashes at an intersection. Traffic roundabouts have a generally favorable safety record, yet often make drivers nervous.
Risks and responses
Safety is generally interpreted as implying a real and significant impact on risk of death, injury or damage to property. In response to perceived risks many interventions may be proposed with engineering responses and regulation being two of the most common.
Probably the most common individual response to perceived safety issues is insurance, which compensates for or provides restitution in the case of damage or loss.
System safety and reliability engineering
System safety and reliability engineering is an engineering discipline. Continuous changes in technology, environmental regulation and public safety concerns make the analysis of complex safety-critical systems more and more demanding.
A common fallacy, for example among electrical engineers regarding structure power systems, is that safety issues can be readily deduced. In fact, safety issues have been discovered one by one, over more than a century in the case mentioned, in the work of many thousands of practitioners, and cannot be deduced by a single individual over a few decades. A knowledge of the literature, the standards and custom in a field is a critical part of safety engineering. A combination of theory and track record of practices is involved, and track record indicates some of the areas of theory that are relevant. (In the USA, persons with a state license in Professional Engineering in Electrical Engineering are expected to be competent in this regard, the foregoing notwithstanding, but most electrical engineers have no need of the license for their work.)
Safety is often seen as one of a group of related disciplines: quality, reliability, availability, maintainability and safety. (Availability is sometimes not mentioned, on the principle that it is a simple function of reliability and maintainability.) These issues tend to determine the value of any work, and deficits in any of these areas are considered to result in a cost, beyond the cost of addressing the area in the first place; good management is then expected to minimize total cost.
Safety measures are activities and precautions taken to improve safety, i.e. reduce risk related to human health. Common safety measures include:
• Root cause analysis to identify causes of a system failure and correct deficiencies.
• Visual examination for dangerous situations such as emergency exits blocked because they are being used as storage areas.
• Visual examination for flaws such as cracks, peeling, loose connections.
• Chemical analysis
• X-ray analysis to see inside a sealed object such as a weld, a cement wall or an airplane outer skin.
• Destructive testing of samples
• Stress testing subjects a person or product to stresses in excess of those the person or product is designed to handle, to determining the "breaking point".
• Safety margins/Safety factors. For instance, a product rated to never be required to handle more than 200 pounds might be designed to fail under at least 400 pounds, a safety factor of two. Higher numbers are used in more sensitive applications such as medical or transit safety.
• Implementation of standard protocols and procedures so that activities are conducted in a known way.
• Training of employees, vendors, product users
• Instruction manuals explaining how to use a product or perform an activity
• Instructional videos demonstrating proper use of products
• Examination of activities by specialists to minimize physical stress or increase productivity
• Government regulation so suppliers know what standards their product is expected to meet.
• Industry regulation so suppliers know what level of quality is expected. Industry regulation is often imposed to avoid potential government regulation.
• Self-imposed regulation of various types.
• Statements of Ethics by industry organizations or an individual company so its employees know what is expected of them.
• Drug testing of employees, etc.
• Physical examinations to determine whether a person has a physical condition that would create a problem.
• Periodic evaluations of employees, departments, etc.
• Geological surveys to determine whether land or water sources are polluted, how firm the ground is at a potential building site, etc
Safety can be limited in relation to some guarantee or a standard of insurance to the quality and unharmful function of an object or organization. It is used in order to ensure that the object or organization will do only what it is meant to do.
It is important to realize that safety is relative. Eliminating all risk, if even possible, would be extremely difficult and very expensive. A safe situation is one where risks of injury or property damage are low and manageable.
You can't remove all the safety hazards from your life, but you can reduce them. You can avoid major hazards and prepare for emergencies by taking the following steps:
• Keep emergency phone numbers by your telephones.
• Make a first aid kit for your home.
• Make a family emergency plan.
• Install and maintain smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors
• Keep guns unloaded and locked up. Lock up the ammunition separately.
• Follow the directions carefully when using tools or equipment.
Young children are especially at risk. Supervision is the best way to keep them safe. Childproofing the house can also help.
You can't remove all the safety hazards from your life, but you can reduce them. You can avoid major hazards and prepare for emergencies by taking the following steps:
• Keep emergency phone numbers by your telephones.
• Make a first aid kit for your home.
• Make a family emergency plan.
• Install and maintain smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors
• Keep guns unloaded and locked up. Lock up the ammunition separately.
• Follow the directions carefully when using tools or equipment.
Young children are especially at risk. Supervision is the best way to keep them safe. Childproofing the house can also help.
A hazard is a situation that poses a level of threat to life, health, property, or environment. Most hazards are dormant or potential, with only a theoretical risk of harm; however, once a hazard becomes "active", it can create an emergency situation. A hazard does not exist when it is happening. A hazardous situation that has come to pass is called an incident. Hazard and vulnerability interact together to create risk.
Hazards are sometimes classified into three modes.
• Dormant - The situation has the potential to be hazardous, but no people, property, or environment is currently affected by this. For instance, a hillside may be unstable, with the potential for a landslide, but there is nothing below or on the hillside that could be affected.
• Armed - People, property, or environment are in potential harm's way.
• Active - A harmful incident involving the hazard has actually occurred. Often this is referred to not as an "active hazard" but as an accident, emergency, incident, or disaster.
• By its nature, a hazard involves something that could potentially be harmful to a person's life, health, property, or the environment. One key concept in identifying a hazard is the presence of stored energy that, when released, can cause damage. Stored energy can occur in many forms: chemical, mechanical, thermal, radioactive, electrical, etc. Another class of hazard does not involve release of stored energy, rather it involves the presence of hazardous situations. Examples include confined or limited egress spaces, oxygen-depleted atmospheres, awkward positions, repetitive motions, low-hanging or protruding objects, etc.
• There are several methods of classifying a hazard, but most systems use some variation on the factors of "likelihood" of the hazard turning into an incident and the "seriousness" of the incident if it were to occur. (This discussion moved away from hazard to a discussion of risk.)
• A common method is to score both likelihood and seriousness on a numerical scale (with the most likely and most serious scoring highest) and multiplying one by the other in order to reach a comparative score.
• Risk = Likelihood of Occurrence x Seriousness if incident occurred
• This score can then be used to identify which hazards may need to be mitigated. A low score on likelihood of occurrence may mean that the hazard is dormant, whereas a high score would indicate that it may be an "active" hazard.
• An important component of "seriousness if incident occurred" is "serious to whom?" Different populations may be affected differently by accidents. For example, an explosion will have widely differing effects on different populations depending on the distance from the explosion. These effects can range from death from overpressure or shrapnel to inhalation of noxious gases (for people downwind) to being exposed to a loud noise.
There are many causes, but they can broadly be classified as below. See the linked articles for comprehensive lists of each type of hazard.
• Natural hazards include anything that is caused by a natural process, and can include obvious hazards such as volcanoes to smaller scale hazards such as loose rocks on a hillside
• Man-made hazards are created by humans, whether long-term (such as global warming) or immediate (like the hazards present at a construction site). These include activity related hazards (such as flying) where cessation of the activity will negate the risk.
• Deadly force or retribution is that hazard involving any protective and responsive-ready threat of harm or punishment that becomes active in the event of a breach of security, or violation of a boundary or barrier (physical, legal, moral) intended to prevent unauthorized or unsafe access or entry or exposure to a situation, to something, or to someone. This includes the consequences that follow trespass, breach of covenant, outrage or moral panic.
• Have you ever found yourself reading an incident report concerning an injury to a worker or damage to equipment and wondered “how in the world did that happen?” More than likely it happened because someone didn’t recognize a hazard. Hazards are the source of personal injuries and damage to vehicles, equipment, and property. Hazards abound at home, work and play. The problem: we don’t see them until they hurt us.
• It’s no joke when someone says “I didn’t see it coming!” Recognizing a hazard requires a trained brain that quickly analyzes the risk and the consequences posed by the situation. It’s not unusual to find that a worker involved in an incident was trained to control hazards associated with his or her work, but had not been specifically trained to see the hazards. This is all a part of the gap between knowing and doing: people know what to do when they recognize the hazard, they just don’t see it.
• Hazard control is the key to preventing injuries and damage, yet to control the hazard, employees at all levels must be trained to recognize them. When you consider this, you’ll start to see the problem in many places. Carl shares the following event that occurred while he was on a trip:
• I was on a business trip to Dallas and happened to look out of my hotel room window. I observed a group of workers cleaning the side of a building across the parking lot. It was obvious the workers were clueless to the danger they had placed themselves in.
• The challenge for these workers was the distance between the parking lot and the building to be cleaned with a pressure washer. Add to this the need to raise and lower the worker operating the pressure washing wand. We often talk about human ingenuity. Well, workers can be quite innovative and get the job done yet put themselves in a precarious situation without even recognizing it.
• These workers had parked a mobile scissor lift in the parking spaces parallel to the sidewalk and the building. The building was approximately twelve feet from the scissor lift. Employing a two by twelve wood board about sixteen feet long, they lashed one end to the floor of the scissor lift. This resembled a diving board, if you can imagine. Being astute innovators of equipment, they positioned three large workers as counter balances to hang on the outside of the guardrail of the lift. Being safety minded the employee with the wand in his hand was standing at the end of the “diving board” wearing fall protection that was clipped onto the basket of the lift twelve feet away (and yes, I am sure the lanyard employed a de-accelerator). Got the picture?
• Being a studious safety professional, I quickly went downstairs and walked toward these hard working, creative gentlemen. As I approached, I said, “I am not with OSHA, but as a certified safety professional it is my duty to stop your operation.” They all got wide-eyed. It was obvious that they heard, “OSHA” and misinterpreted. They stopped working abruptly so I assume they knew their behavior was unsafe. When I asked who was in charge, one of the workers ran through a door and quickly produced the supervisor who was very cooperative.
• The supervisor explained that it was his idea to use the innovated contraption until the rental company delivered the snorkel lift (expected to arrive on site in the next two hours). After a few minutes of discussion with the supervisor and the workers they realized the consequences of their behavior could have been serious. We all shook hands and agreed that they would wait until the rental company showed up with the proper equipment and I promised to not write them a citation (they still thought I was with OSHA). It was just another day in the life of a safety professional.
• Without the ability to see hazards, people will put themselves in positions that can lead to personal or co-worker injury or damage equipment.
• Train Yourself to See: We humans often think that we are above reproach and know that we have been well-trained. Sometimes that can turn into pride and that will get us into trouble. So many times we face unknown or unseen hazards in the workplace. One of the first things you can do is to consider your overall perception of safety. Do you consider that you can have little influence over what happens – that external forces are the primary cause of injuries? Or do you have an internal focus that lets you know that you have a great deal of control over the environment or situation? The degree to which you perceive that you have control over the consequences of a situation is known as the locus of control or LOC. People generally have a strong internal or external safety LOC.
• One of the first things you can do to train yourself to see hazards is to consider your LOC. If you have a strong external LOC, you are likely to think you have little control and therefore may not look for or consider the hazards. This calls for some deep introspection. Think about the times that you’ve been able to avoid injury by wearing your personal protective equipment or by following a procedure. You can even look back on incidents that occurred because you, or someone else, didn’t follow safe work practices. Challenge yourself to look for the things that you can control. If you have a strong internal LOC, you may go too far in thinking that you personally can control hazards and may not use all of the tools and technology at your disposal. It’s simply a good idea – you’ll be surprised how much better you ‘see’ hazards with this personal insight.
• Five Steps to See the Unseen Hazards: It’s important to recognize that we all have trouble seeing hazards sometimes, yet there are several things you can do to improve your ‘hazard vision”:
• 1) Recognize your own perception of your ability to control hazards.
• 2) Discuss and list the typical hazards associated with your industry or your job.
• 3) Work with more experienced people from time to time and ask them what hazards they see – then determine if you see the same ones.
• 4) Take another look around a new work site with the intent of finding hazards that you missed the first time.
• 5) Read incident reports or investigation reports from others to continuously learn about new hazards.
• Perhaps the most important thing you can do to train yourself to recognize hazards is to learn everything you can about controlling various hazards. From that perspective, you’ll discover information that you can apply to keep yourself and others injury-free at work and at home.
The Risk Factor – Learner activity 1 – Hazards for all
Hazards tree board activity – Learner guidelines
This activity will help you to:
• recognise hazards and risks, and plan how to deal with them;
• recognise that hazards pose different levels of risk;
• find out about the risks you may encounter;
• understand the support you may need in dealing with hazards;
• overcome hazards by developing your problem-solving and decision-making skills; and
• improve your communications skills.
Description
• The activity involves:
o the Hazards tree board
o counters
o a spinner (marked with the numbers 1, 2 and 3)
o Hazard cards and Helping hand cards (in two separate piles, face down).
• Up to five learners can participate in the activity.
• In this board activity participants try to climb 20 steps through the trunk and branches of the Hazards tree, to achieve a safe and healthy working environment in a specific industrial workplace or work area (such as a salon, a factory, a restaurant, a manufacturing workshop or an area to which the public has access). Participants must be able to describe this workplace or work area to other participants.
• Participants move counters 1, 2 or 3 steps up the tree trunk and branches, depending on the number shown by a spinner. Participants landing on certain steps of the trunk or branches will need to pick up a Helping hand card or a Hazard card.
• Helping hand cards can help participants to move forwards, provided that they are able to describe how they can use the situation on the card to their advantage in reaching their goal.
• Participants picking up a Hazard card can avoid having to move backwards, either by persuading the other participants that this hazard does not pose a high-level risk in their chosen workplace or work area, or by explaining how the risk from the hazard can be managed in order to remove or reduce it.
• Participants can change their goals at any stage during the activity, as long as they can satisfactorily explain their decision to the other participants.
• The winner is the first to reach their individual goal.
Guidelines
1. Participants start by choosing a leaf of the tree to aim for and identify a workplace that their chosen leaf represents. They should write this on a small sticky note and attach the note to the board by the leaf of their choice. These workplaces or work areas may be linked to the scenarios in The Risk Factor interactive learner resource or to project work, industry visits and work experience. Learners may each choose the same or different workplaces, which could include:
• the paint spraying area in a motor vehicle workshop
• the reprographics department in an office
• the reception area of a beauty salon
• an outdoor film location
• the sales floor of a department store.
2. To climb onto the Hazards tree at the beginning of the activity, each participant must first describe one responsibility of an employee and one responsibility of an employer in making their chosen workplace safe, for example:
• An employee must not be under the influence of drugs whilst operating machinery.
• An employer must provide appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE).
3. Participants will take turns to spin the spinner and move their counter up the Hazards tree by 1, 2 or 3 steps, according to the number on the spinner.
4. If participants land on a Helping hand step, they must pick up and read the top card from the pile of Helping hand cards. They will need to describe how they can use the situation on this card to help them make the workplace safe and healthy. They may then move their counter forward an extra step. If they cannot describe how the situation on the card would help them, they do not move forward the extra step. As cards are used, they are replaced at the bottom of the pile.
5. If participants land on a Hazard step, they must pick up and read the top card from the pile of Hazard cards. They must try to explain the level of risk of the hazard on the card (high, medium or low) and how they would manage the risk. If the participant’s explanation is convincing, the participant keeps their position on the board. If the participant does not convince the others, they must move three steps backwards.
If the participants are not in agreement over whether or not an explanation deals with the hazard, the teacher may give the final vote. As the Hazard cards are used, they are replaced at the bottom of the pile.
6. To move from the trunk of the Hazards tree onto their chosen tree branch, participants must describe two personal qualities that will help them work safely. For example:
• I should be tidy when working in a reprographics department so that people do not trip over boxes of paper.
• When working on the sales floor of a busy department store, I should remain calm, even when dealing with dissatisfied customers.
7. At various points (for instance, when landing on a Helping hand step or a Hazard step, moving from the trunk to a branch, or if changing goal) a participant will need to justify their decisions in order to move forward. The teacher or other participants may ask questions to help the participant such as:
• What previous experiences of your own could you refer to, to help you answer this?
• What knowledge do you have that would help you to avoid becoming ill?
• How can you use help from others to work safely on new equipment?
However, if a participant needs this support, they must miss their next go.
8. Any participant landing on step 13 must move sideways to step 13 on any one of the other branches as soon as possible, via the rope. If they can describe what their new workplace is, then they can also move forwards two steps on the new pathway.
Hazard cards
Hazard cards
Hazard cards
Hazard cards
Helping hand cards
Helping hand cards
Helping hand cards
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