As an international safety speaker, I have the privilege of sharing safety stories with people all around the world. How often do your friends and family hear you talk about safety? Whenever a situation occurs in your life that illustrates a hazard you avoided or how safety knowledge protected you there is a natural opportunity to share that story with the people you care about.

Making mistakes is part of being human. There are many factors that contribute to making mistakes, including inattention, lack of experience and over-confidence. In recent years, the field of behavior-based safety has exploded. Much of its focus is on assessing why people make mistakes, and what to do about it.

ISHM is proud and honored to be allowed to exhibit at several safety/trade shows/expos yearly. As with most vendors we arrive a day early and use most of the available time to set up our booth area.

The technical detail available to members of our profession is incredible. It also has the potential to be suffocating as the voluminous regulations, ISO policies, procedures, local site requirements, paperwork, basic training, etc. become overwhelming commitments of our time and effort. With all this focus on reactive and condition-based issues, where is the time for a safety engineering focus that goes beyond traditional safety?

Do I Report Heart Attacks? Do I have to report a work-related fatality or in-patient hospitalization caused by a heart attack? Yes, your local OSHA Area Office director will decide whether to investigate the event, depending on the circumstances of the heart attack.

In the 1960s, there was a popular show called Candid Camera. It was one of the first reality TV shows. The premise of the show was that individuals were secretly filmed after being placed in unusual, ridiculous or embarrassing situations.

A heavy manufacturing organization commonly used Total Quality Manufacturing (TQM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) techniques. They had some small Continuous Improvement (CI) Teams that engaged in solving the front line day-to-day difficulties which commonly occur in operations of organizations worldwide.

Two years ago, I published an article about water safety. The response was very dramatic. I have decided to republish this article every year to help everyone enjoy the water with no loss of life. This article is dedicated to Zachary, a young grandson of a fellow safety professional who left this life June 1st a couple of years ago. Below is the original article, the response and my follow-up article.

Recently, one of our safety pro acquaintances made a disturbing discovery --his responsibility for improving safety was being hampered by a culture of evaporative acts in the work groups with whom he was to meet. His approach of engaging in open-ended safety conversations with front line employees had developed trust among many of the people at each of the work sites.

Is driver safety seen and acted on by senior management as a critical safety issue? Frequently we see lip service paid to driver safety, with strong statements of corporate commitment but an absence of meaningful action.