Safety Knights

Wow, does this bring back the memories! I do not live and work in the "boonies" but this is no metro area and we had no taxi service that would handle injured employees (blood borne pathogen and ER care concerns). I am anxious to hear the responses.

Twenty five years ago I had to go back to being a Manufacturing Supervisor after being a Plant Manager and a Personnel Manager. I was assigned to machining operation on the midnight shift with about 300 employees. I was the sole manager but did have some hourly "leaders" that helped me. However, from about 10:30 PM, when my second shift managers left, till about 5:30 AM, when the first shift managers arrived I was the only management person in this 350,000 sq ft facility. It would get pretty lonely sometimes at 3:00 AM with all the various ops problems coming up. That compounded with injuries that were serious but did not rise to the level of an ambulance made things worse! I was ordered never to leave the plant myself.

I did have a great first aid team, which also had a several trained First Aid employees, a couple First Responders and one volunteer fireman/EMT. That helped a lot!

I asked and asked for assistance from Personnel/HR to no avail, which really angered me as a former PM myself. I just got so that if an employee needed medical care above what the First Aid team could do I just called the ambulance! HR would have to worry about how the ambulance bill got paid! After about the second time HR had to deal with that problem, (and that is always a real pain!) I finally got some assistance although it never really addressed the total issue! HR worked out some deal with the Fire Dept to provide non-emergency transport. I refined the agreement some when a couple years later I was the HR Manager and had EHS. But we really never had a great solution!

It got to be a real problem when a few years later the local hospital an Occ Clinic stopped providing Non-ER transport during the day!

I live out in the boonies, as well, so I know the struggle. In the past at previous employers, injured/ill workers had one of two options:
• They get transported to the closest hospital via ambulance if it was an emergency; OR
• They get transported by a salaried employee via a company vehicle (or personal vehicle if there are no company vehicles) to the closest urgent clinic, doctor, etc. if was NOT an emergency. The person transporting them had to be trained in first aid and CPR so that in the event anything happened en route, they could administer basic first aid and life-saving skills after calling 911 until Fire/EMS arrived.

HR never liked sending an "extra person" with them because they "didn't want to pay an employee to sit there in a doctor's office". However, at the end of the day, you have to evaluate the situation and place the worker's health and well-being above production, operations, etc. As an EMT, I usually had no problem convincing management to send the extra person. In most cases, I didn't even have to mention the legal liability side of things - usually just had to explain the potential medical issues that may arise.

I would never send them without a company employee, and very rarely would I ever allow an injured/ill worker to transport themselves to a medical facility.