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Showing posts from October, 2016

Fireworks Safety

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What to focus on - Accident or Injury?

Thanks to safety professionals for responding to the topic “Why I called LTIFR a DECEPTIVE”. I judged from the responses I received that there is confusion in between Accident and Injury. As a matter of fact, many safety professional use these terms interchangeably but we need to have clear understanding about the both. Accident is an undesirable, unplanned and unwanted event that may results into some kind of loss. The loss may be in terms of first aid, disabling injury or fatal and also may be loss to asset/environment. So injury is one of the several losses post an accident. So in that sense, injury is aftermath of an accident. Now, what should we aim for prevention - Injury or Accident? Your answer must be Accident. Why, because of the following facts: There is very thin control on severity of an injury. An accident should not treated as minor or major based on the extent of injury sustained because it is merely a coincidence (someone may say it luck) after an accident. For

How much you know about safety profession??

I have heard and it's true in my view too, that Safety person is the person who never wants an accident to happen and if something goes wrong, he feels very low. My poem is a dedicated to this profession. Pl read and share with other safety person if you feel it worth sharing.                                                     Safety Guy                     Behold, thy poor safety man!                     He does all that he can,                     to stop accident to happen,                     to reduce suffering and pain. His position is a legal need, otherwise it’s useless indeed. By behaviour he’s a lead. Self zeal keeps him ahead.                  He may be seen at seat,                  at corner farthest in street,                 mostly a place near a treat,                 or vicinity of a store nit.                              He’s favourite of none,                              b’cause he objects unsafe action.                              He’

Why ZERO Accident - If not ZERO defects or ZERO waste

This time, I am presenting my views on an aspect (a long text which I avoid but pl bear this time) we have been following since long in safety profession. I have never come across any industry in my tenure of almost 20/26 years where performance of employee are judged against the annual target of ZERO quality defects or ZERO process waste generation. Although no organisation aims to produce defective products or high waste generation, yet they take a target of certain reduction over hind year and gradually reach near zero value through continuous technology up gradation and people involvement.   Several rounds of meeting are hold with line function before arrival at an annual target to be achieved. SMART philosophy is employed for goal setting. While doing the exercise it is collectively realized that achieving ZERO defects, waste or breakdowns is not possible because of many disabling factors in the system after certain level and non fulfilment will have negative impact. ZERO i

A poem dedicated to safety profession

                                  Safety Guy Behold thy poor safety man. He does all that he can, to stop accident to happen, to reduce suffering and pain. His position is a legal need, otherwise it’s useless indeed. By behaviour he’s a lead. Self zeal keeps him ahead. He may be seen at seat, at corner farthest in street, mostly a place near a treat, or vicinity of a store nit.                               He’s favourite of none,                               b’cause he objects unsafe action.                               He’s self-starter, works on his own, and is a champ without recognition. When something goes wrong, He comes on everybody’s tongue. He moans himself all along, as sole mourner among.                               If a month is injury free,                               It’s time for everybody’s spree.                               Other than him all agree,                               It’s o

Why I called LTIFR- a DECEPTIVE

Thank you for your overwhelming valuable comments/suggestion etc. on "Beware of LTIFR-It's DECEPTIVE". I would like to state here that, through this write up, I only affirmed views of many safety practitioners. I would also like to say here, there is no harm in computing and publishing LTIFR. The only request I wanted to make here that LTIFR is unable to provide you any inference. A zero or near zero value may not reflect the underlying safety weaknesses of the organisation rather it renders the organisation complacence and in turn many good efforts in the direction of reducing injury are lessened or given up. Contrary to this, big number discourages the organisation and makes it feel low on this account. As such your LTIFR should not drive your safety programs and action strategy. The gist of the point is, we should keep our efforts directed towards reducing the ARBs-at-risk behaviours of the workers and increase SBs-safe behaviours on strong foundation of need based

Beware of LTIFR- It’s DECEPTIVE

Many of us use LTIFR and like statistics to measure the safety performance but how much it helps an organisation to gauge health of their safety performance or to compare with other like organisation as benchmark are confusing. I fear much opposition to this however, in the interest of the profession I must tell my mind that LTIFR never contribute any good to safety improvement or anything to take inference from. It has very little predictive value to understand about the safety culture or as indicator of achievement / failure in safety. You may have heard much industry boast of no LTI – lost time injury for many years and hence zero FR- frequency rate and all of a sudden many deaths are reported. You may be working or had worked in an industry wherein accidents of severe nature would have happened after many years of good times and not to mention here that you might have been cheering up this good time based on zero or near zero LTIFR. Now, it is my opinion that the focu

Many know safety-very few understand it

Safety Mathematics - Accidents add sufferings, subtract happiness, multiply worries and divide income.   I would say with my experience, most persons know that adopting unsafe behaviour would bring pain to them, yet they do not care to correct it. I know you may list out many reasons why people behave unsafely but I would add to this list with one more reason. That one reason is "seeing immediate perceived positive consequences in adopting unsafe behaviour. The perceived positive consequences are comfort, quick completion of work, appreciation from supervisors (very often), peer praise etc. A person fails to understand that the behaviour of being at construction site will injure his head on the day when he will not wear helmet. When he comes out without injury, the consequence in form of comfort in not having anything on his head (here helmet), went straight at work so supervisor appreciated in silence (saved a little time otherwise would spent on getting helmet) and sense