Before an organization begins to curse safety, it is probable that one or more of the following have occurred: regulators with a limited knowledge base of safety have caused grief, a condition of supposed danger has led to an operations shutdown, a series of injuries or a severe injury has caused notable concern.
A number of companies have made significant improvements to their safety cultures. Their progress is so dramatic, they often come to the realization that it is highly probable that their next fatality will come from a contractor they hire. To safety leaders, this is not an acceptable risk.
Physician texting while doctoring could be hazardous, according to an ideas and opinions piece published in the Dec. 3 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
December 30, 2013
Christine A. Sinsky, M.D., from the Medical Associates Clinic in Dubuque, Iowa, and John W. Beasley, M.D., from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, discuss the potential risks posed by physicians typing into electronic health records during patient encounters.
One of your readers recently emailed: “I have always found it interesting that the ES&H function in a significant number of corporations is managed, note I did not say led, by executives who have failed somewhere else in their corporation and are clueless when it comes to ES&H activities.”
"If someone is injured or killed there will be no liability"
December 23, 2013
I preferred to give you my input privately. When in private industry, my supervisor, the HR manager, kept telling me that if I found safety hazards I could not put it in writing, that way "if management does nothing and someone is injured or killed there will be no liability."
I know that some people – perhaps many - believe that there is a “trade-off” between EHS and shareholder value. That is, that there is a “cost” to shareholders for achieving superior EHS performance. This is generally not true in my experience. As I will speak to later – I believe that EHS and financial performance more often than not move in the same direction.
I had been warmly welcomed to South Africa. We were there to work with a mining construction company who wanted to solve their safety challenge. The immensity of this challenge hit us on our day off while we dealt with our jet lag.
As people were gathering for the meeting, Ami, the safety professional who had brought me to their site, thanked one of the employees for being at the evening session. The employee replied, “Management ‘strongly recommended’ we attend.” By the tone of his voice, he made it clear his leadership was doing all but making attendance at the meeting mandatory.