2. Most employees conclude that the safety staff is
responsible for preventing damage, injury or death from
occurring in the workspace, though that would logically
require prescience. Instead, safety professionals provide
risk identification so that protective policies, procedures
and equipment can be put in place. The most successful
example in the history of the industrial age is venerable
construction hard hats.
3. Although people can readily identify hazards in a new
place as they enter for the first time, they seldom bring
it up as they are trying to get the job. After they are
hired, they walk past the hazard again and again, and
soon it no longer registers as a problem. This is how
blatant deficiencies and dangerous conditions persist for
long periods of time, until someone gets hurt.
4. No matter how vigilant, inspections can not find all the
conditions in a work environment that can be dangerous
to workers. The people who work in the area of a hazard
have usually already assimilated the condition into their
environment and no longer perceive it as a hazard. For
this reason, real answers to not get put in place until
after an accident has occurred.
5. Blood priority is how safety professionals describe the
process of incremental introduction of safeguards piece
by piece as the situations cause damage, injury or death.
The problem is that in the absence of an accident,
efforts to increase safety fall on deaf ears. For those
things already in place, safety staff have to remind
workers why the protective policy or equipment was
introduced to gain compliance.
6. Human nature has a deeply ingrained belief that when it
comes to accidents and misfortune, it might happen to
others, but is unlikely to affect someone here. There is,
in no small part, a general belief that those who become
the victim of a workplace mishap did something wrong.
It is a notion that common sense will prevent accidents,
and those who experience them are somehow
incompetent.
7. Reality bears proof that this is simply not the case, there
is no evidence that any significant proportion of injured
workers are incompetent or careless. Injuries happen to
all manner of employee, because they are all human and
are susceptible to the most dangerous of things-distraction. Anything that causes a distraction or alters
the normal pattern of behavior can result in an injury.
8. No matter how experienced, skilled and professional
one is, circumstances can combined to change the focus
normally demonstrated by an individual. When even a
single mistake can be disastrous, more extreme
measures are in place, so airlines use multiple pilots,
and they work exclusively by checklist, and even still
there are occasional slips. While it is not yet universal,
surgeons are beginning to use this method.
9. Over time most occupations have been analyzed and
appropriate procedures put in place, and in addition
personal protective gear has been developed for extra
protection. But many employees find this equipment
tedious and unnecessary and do not use it. The gold
standard for such personal protective equipment
overcame all forms of resistance and became a symbol
of respected work on construction sites; hard hats.