Big Spike In Injuries
Most if us that have been in the business for awhile have lived through this at least a few times. You have a couple great years with a steady and sure reduction in injuries. Maybe you start feeling a little over confident or just take your foot off the pedal a bit! All of sudden in 6 months you have a big spike in injuries, maybe three times as many as you had all the previous year!
I have a client that has that problem currently. I just did a injury analysis and it looks like what they have going on is as I described above! People have taken their eyes off the ball, gotten sloppy, and lazy. They have taken things for granted!
I know the long term solution is to transform the culture to being proactive, totally engaged (employees), and committed. But in the short term what is in your toolbox to "stop-the-bleeding" so we can get to the long term? "The alligators are on our buts now!"
I promise to take what I have and combine it with yours to write an article to share with everyone and help all of us!
PS the picture below is not me, I purchased it, I am much better looking! Fitz
Comments (4)
Really depends on the injury. We've been having a lot of slips and strains, even in the summer months. Currently evaluating our ergonomics program and focusing in on ergo related trainings.
It all depends on the type of injury and causal factors. A thorough incident investigation should have been done on each incident to determine all of the causal factors. It could be production deadlines and rushing to get jobs done, or it could be policies aren't clearly written, they weren't properly communicated, or the training on that particular topic wasn't effective and needs to be evaluated. In my experience, it's not that they've taken their eyes off of safety, per se, but more so that their "luck" has ran out. I've worked for companies that when I took over as Corporate Safety Director, they had zero (or only a few) incidents for several years in the past, yet they didn't have hardly any safety policies in place, their training sessions were about 10-15 minutes long, and they never evaluated anything. I find it hard to say that their record of very few to no incidents was due to their safety programs in place because they were non-existent.
Overall, I think you need to look at each individual incident and figure out what causal factors contributed, then address them. If you see a common trend between incidents, then maybe there is a correlation. However, everything needs to be evaluated, ranging from the training staff to ensure they're actually qualified and competent to teach the topic(s) to how they are enforcing the policies/procedures. Lots of variables here, so it's hard to say how to fix multiple incidents without knowing the details.
If they're not doing them already, I would start out with daily toolbox talks for each department/area and have it focused on hazards applicable to their area, rather than just easy topics that can be downloaded from the internet. Rotate who does each toolbox talk to bring a fresh perspective to each day's TBT, as well as ensure everyone is held accountable for contributing. I'd also check applicable training records. Doing training doesn't always mean the training was done properly.