Singareni Collieries Company Limited sets focus on safety precautions
In its quest for greater productivity with utmost focus on safety in coal mines, the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) is striving to foster a sustainable safety culture by involving the safety committee members of each coal mine in the effective implementation of the Safety Management Plan (SMP) in their respective coal mines.
The safety wing of the State-owned premier coal producing company has conducted a slew of training programmes for the members of the safety committees in various coal mines in Kothagudem region earlier this year.
The company has resumed the training programmes after a short break of a couple of weeks owing to the coronavirus-induced crisis consequent upon its renewed plans to scale up coal production to make up for the production losses suffered during the recent lockdown period.
Ep.51 How do experts manage fuzzy role boundaries?
Topics:
Dr. Neale’s PhD thesis. How he gained access to the F-band community. The tension between people in front-line occupations and safety professionals. Improvising and standardizing. The tension between individuals and bureaucracy. How to be an effective communicator. What happens after a big fire season. Becoming a fire behavior analyst.
Quotes:
“When you’re interacting with somebody, what is your expertise based in?”
“There’s no one way of doing it right and any attempt to wrangle these people, these professionals into being all one type of person, they will resist it.”
“The theme that expresses itself in a particular part of people’s work, expresses itself in many other parts of their work; it’s not a contained problem…”
NBAF UPDATE | Serving the greater good
This past month, we have been grateful to speak with several community groups across the region about the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. From those discussions, we know that one of the most common concerns about the facility is safety.
For NBAF to serve the greater good of protecting our food supply, agricultural economy and public health, it also must have an internal focus on safety. NBAF’s success with safety will be attributed to a combination of three basic core areas: people, procedures and facility.
Focusing on people first, we’ve discovered NBAF employees have a common desire to serve that greater good and are naturally focused on safety and security. This shared interest is a lifelong passion for many of our employees. … The partnerships also will help serve the greater good through outcomes like vaccines and faster diagnostics for high-consequence animal diseases. With Dr. Wilson’s extensive experience in many biosecurity facilities, he has a great background to provide guidance and suggestions to continue to expand NBAF’s safety and security culture.
The second area contributing to our safety culture is incorporating proven processes and best practices into Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and continually updating them as new proven approaches are identified. These SOPs identify the step-by-step measures to be followed by NBAF staff in operating the facility and conducting research.
Finally, having a facility that ensures the safety of workers and the public is a third element in building NBAF’s safety culture. NBAF’s building has many safety system redundancies, which also incorporates design criteria used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for withstanding a tornado. This will allow U.S. scientists to safely study zoonotic diseases, those diseases that can transfer from animals to humans, in large livestock at the highest level of biosafety, BSL-4 — critical research that cannot be done anywhere else in the nation currently. In fact, only four other facilities in the world can conduct BSL-4 research on large livestock.
https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/20399-my-story-victor-lawe
My journey into safety began in 1990 with the U.S. Army, as my unit was ramping up to deploy to Saudi Arabia in support of Operation Desert Shield. My unit’s first sergeant asked for volunteers to be trained as combat lifesavers. Before I raised my hand, I asked what that was. Combat lifesavers are first aid responders who are trained beyond basic first aid to start and maintain IVs, perform CPR, and use various field-expedient methods on soldiers under combat conditions. I received the training and maintained that certification throughout the rest of my career in the Army. After I was commissioned as an officer, I inherited the additional duties of battalion range safety officer and unit safety officer.
Since my first civilian job, I have held numerous leadership positions in production management. I naturally gravitated toward safety committees, making safety improvements, safety audits and the like. I was drawn to manufacturing.
At my last manufacturing facility, I was “voluntold” by my plant manager in 2018 that he wanted me to become the new environmental, health and safety manager for the next 90 days. If it worked out, the job was mine. Previously, our human resources manager was wearing two hats: HR and safety. As such, our plant fell behind in getting key safety objectives completed. In 32 days, I melted down her stack of past due objectives to zero.
I then left the private sector to become the safety officer for the City of Rocky Mount, NC. My challenge here is to remember that it’s not a homogenous operation like manufacturing. We have 13 departments, 42 divisions, 1,277 employees and one of me. Some things I handle personally, and others I outsource to consultants and service providers. I had to change my tactics from being the hands-on EHS manager to a safety consultant. I made it my mission to visit each of the different facilities to conduct safety inspections to provide me with a baseline of where our city’s safety programs stood. These inspections provided a two-way training environment. I received informal training on what each division does daily. I observed the indigenous hazards of their jobs and how they deal with them. The divisions received informal training on the hazards or unsafe conditions in their workplace. Being a visible force for good has installed newfound respect from the employees to the directors for the position I now command.
Celebrate REALTOR Safety Year-Round with a Customized Safety Culture Program www.prnewswire.com/news-rele…
LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Oct. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ – The Beverly Carter Foundation (BCF) is proud to introduce a three-part training series to assist leadership throughout the real estate industry in implementing sustainable safety strategies for their companies, associations, and employees year-round in order to prevent lone-worker tragedies and long-term harm. The new normal of COVID-19 restrictions, limited showings, increase of virtual communication, and one-on-one meetings are presenting new challenges. In order to support this safety initiative, BCF’s first training, Leadership: Creating a Safety Culture Year-Round, will be held as a webinar Tuesday, October 27, 2020.
“Lone-worker safety starts at the top. By providing education to the decision makers in the industry, we are able to prevent not only tragedy, but inspire a culture of community in this bizarre time,” says Carl Carter Jr. “Beverly Carter Foundation was established in the wake of a horrific tragedy. My greatest pride is knowing together we can help others, perhaps even save a life.”
Investigating Chemical Safety Awareness and Practices in Nigerian Schools
Chemical safety, a practice of protecting humans and the environment in which they work and live from the deleterious effects of chemical substances, was investigated in this study in Nigerian secondary schools. Using a mixed-method survey, we investigated the awareness level and implementation of the best practices of chemical safety by 1246 senior secondary school chemistry students. Students in rural schools were found to have a lower level of awareness of chemical safety compared to the students in urban schools. Statistically significant differences were found in all except one of the awareness measures—washing hands before practicals and after leaving the chemistry lab. Urban students were more in breach of chemical safety practices than students in rural schools. Most of the observed differences were statistically significant (p < 0.001). Interview (qualitative) data from 20 students show four emerging themes to explain the findings, including a low level of chemistry laboratory resourcing, poor chemical safety training of the teachers, inadequacies in safety tools, charts, and kits, and weak enforcement of safety regulations. Based on the data from the study, recommendations were made for bolstering the awareness level of students in chemical safety and their chemical safety practices. These include the incorporation of chemical safety in the core curriculum, requiring quality assurance entities to enforce resourcing of basic safety equipment to schools, government-directed workshops on the need for chemical safety, and requiring teachers to provide chemical hazards information to students.
From Crisis to Culture: Moving from COVID Crisis Response to Implementing a “COVID-19 Culture”
The threat of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) took center stage in the world’s theater, seemingly overnight. Hospitals, schools, airlines, and industries of all types scrambled to react to the rapidly changing dynamics of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Federal, state, and local agencies issued rapid-fire guidance as this virus evolved from an epidemic to a global pandemic.
Soon after, some agencies identified the need to revise and reissue certain recommendations, as more information was obtained through epidemiological data and scientific research and modeling. Add in presidential executive orders, state shelter-in-place orders, and even some local ordinances, and the best one could do was to react and respond to this ever-changing crisis.
Today, we see that COVID-19 isn’t a blip on the radar screen. We are many months away from proven treatments and possibly years away from an approved and widely adopted, effective vaccine. As such, we enter the stage where we move from reaction to proactive planning to mitigate and manage risk in the workplace, communities, schools, public spaces and events, and beyond.
Enter the era of the “new normal.”
The “New Normal” What does the COVID-19 “new normal” look like? It is still challenging to define, much less predict. Applicable guidance and the realities of the serious adverse health consequences of this virus reveal a specific need for the identification and implementation of COVID-19 control strategies and associated monitoring, verification, corrective actions, training, and documentation. The new normal also prompts the need to enhance a “COVID-19 culture,” akin to the foundation laid by food safety culture principles.
SUMMARY
Roundabouts are designed to make intersections safer and more efficient for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. The last few years has seen the addition of several roundabouts constructed for use on our roadways. Most drivers are unfamiliar with the use of this type of intersection, or how to navigate them. Especially if they are multiple lane roundabouts.
[NSW could relax social distancing rules for venues but only if masks are mandated[ (https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/nsw/nsw-could-relax-social-distancing-rules-for-venues-but-only-if-masks-are-mandated-20201011-p563zg.html)
The NSW government is considering relaxing the four-square-metre distancing rule and limitations on large gatherings. These, and the closure of international borders, are hurting the economy.
As long as the government is prepared to be flexible and retighten these rules if COVID-19 in the community should require it, it could sensibly plan for these measures. Closing international borders is a major reason why we are in a position where we can consider these kinds of rollbacks. Substantially opening them could result in significant community transmission.
…
Business owners must equally take responsibility for collaborating in a safety culture. A breach, as recently happened in the south-western Sydney cluster, makes contact tracing impossible, and increases the risk of silent epidemic growth. Contact tracing is feasible when the outbreaks are small, but when you have to trace thousands to hundreds of thousands of contacts at a day, even the best-resourced health system will not be able to keep up. SARS-COV-2 infections grow exponentially. The virus does not wait for anyone, nor care about our wishes for a return to normal life. If we deny the existence of the worst pandemic in living memory, raging outside our borders, we tempt fate.
Ep.48 What are the missing links between investigating incidents and learning from incidents?
EPISODE NOTES This discussion is building off last week’s episode where we focused on blame. We thought we would dig a little deeper into how people learn from incidents.
We use the paper, What is Learning? A Review of the Safety Literature to Define Learning from Incidents, Accidents, and Disasters, in order to frame our chat.
Topics:
Single and double-loop learning. Incident learning models. The least effective method of learning. How to make a safety bulletin effective. Why organizational trust is a factor in learning. Why management is important to creating a culture of safety. Lessons Learned About Lessons Learned Systems. Practical takeaways.
Quotes:
“Learning from accidents is pretty much the oldest type of safety work that exists…and almost from the very start, people have been complaining after accidents about people’s failure to learn from previous accidents.”
“This paper really confirms the answer that we gave last week to our question about, ‘does blame sort of get in the way of learning?’ “
“You’ve got to admit that you are wrong now in order to become correct in the future.”
NTI WELCOMES HVSI FUNDING FOR SAFETY CULTURE INITIATIVE
Heavy truck and transport insurer NTI is looking to press ahead with its Driving a National Culture of Safety initiative after being named amongst the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator’s (NHVR’s) 2020 Heavy Vehicle Safety Initiative (HVSI) grant recipients.
The $300,000 grant supports NTI’s proposed, a 12 month campaign to deliver online, digital and interactive heavy vehicle educational content, with the aim to embed an industry-wide view on safety culture.
NTI developed the initiative to address customer insights revealing a need for better management of safety priorities within the industry and support for businesses in communicating these to their people to create better culture.
Food safety culture: What to do now that everyone is watching?
This year has brought nothing but huge changes for the world, especially for the food industry. Shutdowns, new operational models, and re-openings at this scale are new territory for us all. Even the definition of food safety culture has changed from “what you’re doing when no one is watching” to “what you do when everyone is watching.”
Customers and employees have their eyes open wider than ever before. Employees are watching to make sure you’re not taking their safety for granted, and customers are watching closely to make sure your employees’ actions don’t ring any alarm bells for health and safety.
Even though the definition of food safety culture has expanded, that doesn’t mean the purpose of food safety culture has changed. And the purpose of creating a food safety culture plan is to reap the benefits of employee buy-in, reduced risk, increased personal responsibility and ownership of food safety and customer experience, and more.
Keeping Safety Top Of Mind For Airports Safety Week
Today, Kelowna International Airport (YLW), along with 27 airports across Canada, kicked off Canadian Airports Safety Week, an airport-led initiative to promote healthy and safe work practices among airport employees.
“Our focus has always been on ensuring YLW remains, safe, secure and operational for everyone who enters the terminal or steps onto the airfield,” said Sam Samaddar, Airport Director. “This year has presented new challenges due to COVID-19, which is why it is more important than ever for employees to keep safety top of mind so they return home safely at the end of every shift.”
From September 28 to October 1, all airport staff, whether they are working in the terminal building or on the airfield, will have the opportunity to take part in virtual safety-themed activities and events throughout the week. This week is a prime opportunity to introduce and remind airport employees of the new safety culture at airports due to COVID-19 as well as a chance to thank them for their contributions to safety.
“There is always something new to learn and getting to hear perspectives from others working in the industry is extremely valuable,” said Peter Parrotta, Operations Manager, Strategic Aviation Kelowna. “These sessions give employees the opportunity to learn how to mitigate hazards and integrate safety skills into the work they do each day.”
Q&A: Training is essential to creating a positive food safety culture
How can the Lobster Ink program be adapted for different areas of foodservice, and how does it tailor training to different roles and levels of seniority within one operation?
The Lobster Ink program is grounded in science-based food safety principles that are explained in a practical manner. The content can be applicable for FSR, QSR and food retail environments.
The manager oversight courses give the manager or person in charge the tools and best practices to lead by example and take corrective action when needed. Monitoring the process and acknowledging good and poor behaviors and taking corrective action is crucial to the ongoing success of a positive food safety culture.
How can this approach to training help create a culture of food safety within an organization?
A positive food safety culture is extremely important because it shows the value and commitment of the team. To have a positive food safety culture, people need to understand why it matters and – more importantly – why it matters to them. They are taught that they have the choice to make good food safety choices and they have investment in the brand. The Lobster Ink training program explains to the learner the implications of poor food safety behaviors. Essentially, their actions can also affect their coworkers and the guests. They will learn that a safe environment positively affects the guests, the restaurant and themselves.
YCU appeals youngsters to take part in shaping traffic safety culture
The Youth Communist Union (YCU) in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday launched a campaign to call for participation of young people in ensuring traffic safety and shaping traffic safety culture. Young participants will disseminate traffic safety information and regulations as well as encourage residents to obey the rules shaping traffic safety culture. Additionally, police force, volunteers jointly keep traffic security and give assistance to residents who encounter traffic incidents at nights in the national highways and roads. Young people will also take part in controlling traffic in 59 intersections, 49 roads and in front of schools and hospital where traffic congestion usually take place in rush hours. Right after the launching ceremony, young people traveled to intersections and roads to monitor traffic.
How Sharing Across Industries (Including Competitors) Can Accelerate Innovation
Safety Culture Enters the Office
Safety has long been the focus of the industrial world. We can’t even imagine opening a factory without it. Now, the pandemic has necessitated that offices become much more focused on developing a similar safety culture. This is a huge shift because at best, the most pressing physical issue for knowledge workers has been ergonomics. Now, leaders and employees are asking questions about how they can return to the office safely while clearly, quickly maintaining lines of communication.
Social distancing guidelines make it a requirement for businesses to understand how their buildings are being used, how people move through the space, and how building systems keep them comfortable and healthy. This requires tools that can aggregate business, building and security data to drive decision making and communications. A few more examples:
What Can We Do During The First 100-Days Of Aviation Club Operations?
Safety culture: Again, if you don’t actively define your safety culture, one will emerge, and you may not like it. Now is the time to define and follow a method to ensure that club members stay proficient, and not just current. A culture of safety is essential for any pilot, but particulary for a club, where positive mentoring is such a powerful positive tool, yet where complacency and poor examples, especially from members who are perceived, rightly or not, as “a good stick”, can have an equally powerful negative impact.
We’ve done a lot of work this year on the notion of a club’s safety culture and we recently introduced WINGS for Clubs. The FAA Safety Team (FAASTeam) WINGS program is exactly what clubs need. Many of us use the faasafety.gov website as a source of courses, quizzes, seminars and webinars, where members can stay proficient in aviation knowledge, but WINGS is so much more than that. You can earn a “phase” of WINGS by completing within 12-months, three knowledge tasks and three flight tasks, with a CFI. These tasks are well documented with background material and worksheets designed to conform to the ACS—Airmen Certification Standards. Compare this with the “currency” requirements of a Flight Review. Instead of the predictable minimum 1-hour of ground and 1-hour of flight time every 24-calencar months, competing a phase of WINGS gets you flying with a CFI three times a year, so you go beyond currency and strive for proficiency. Oh, by the way, completing a phase of WINGS also qualifies as a flight review.
Chemical Spillage as a Model for Accident Causation
Chemical spillage has been measured for undergraduate students undertaking a laboratory practical designed to help develop their chemical handling skills. There was a low correlation found between the amount of chemical spilled and the ability to accurately carry out the primary goal of the experiment, which was to measure the concentrations of samples of unknown dilution. There was also a low correlation between the amount spilled by individual students carrying out consecutive experiments, which is consistent with the proportion of spillage incidents due to personal factors (e.g., accident-prone individuals) being low. Quantitatively, only ≈6% of the spillages could be accounted for by factors relating to the individual, with a (95%) confidence interval of 0.2–23%. These observations therefore indicate that a blame culture should be avoided when dealing with chemical spillages, and also that a more effective focus for efforts to improve laboratory safety should be on organizational or workplace factors, through, for example, improving teaching methods for all students, rather than targeting specific individuals for retraining who may have had a noticeable chemical mishap. These observations also suggest that the volume of chemical spilled by a student should not be used as a measure for summative assessment, as it is a poor predictor of future spillage.
Today’s New Employee Safety Culture is Benefitting Hotel Workers, Guests in Big Ways
A new safety culture has emerged in hospitality that places employee protection at the core of operations. Prior to the global pandemic, hoteliers were already rolling out employee safety devices (ESDs) per legislative mandates and commitments to industry programs like the American Hotel & Lodging Assn.’s 5-Star Promise to better protect their people from sexual harassment situations and threats of violence. Today, as hotel employees put their lives on the line to welcome back guests, they are safer than ever before thanks to new policies, procedures, and technologies designed to limit staff/guest interaction, eradicate disease, and dispatch help in an instant.
What does this new employee safety culture look like today? It depends on each hotel company and the location of its properties. Through a new webcast series titled “New World, New Employee Safety Culture” I spoke with hoteliers to find out how their employee safety culture is taking shape. Here is what I learned…
Training and More Training
Ryan Doi, Corporate Director of Information Systems for Prince Resorts Hawaii, said the new employee safety culture at Prince Resorts is centered on training, and safety is not just defined by physical protection, but by providing financial assistance to workers as well.
Chulalongkorn University’s Center for Safety, Health and Environment
In its commitment to provide a healthy and safe working environment for the CU community, Chulalongkorn University’s Center for Safety, Health and Environment of Chulalongkorn University (SHECU), is determined to make Chula a zero-accident organization by 2021.
On 26 May 2020, SHECU released four announcements on the standard practices of managing occupational safety and health in a working environment, and guidelines on radiation safety, chemical safety, and biosafety and biosecurity.
Professor Tirayut Vilaivan, Director at SHECU, reveals that in the past the safety on campus was managed by individual faculties and departments, causing the measures to lack consistency in practice. By 2016, the University established the Center for Safety, Health and Environment of Chulalongkorn University to promote and drive health and safety policies on campus.
Following the Occupational Safety, Health, and Environment Act in 2011, the University established a work safety management system that complied accordingly to the provisions. The four announcements released set clear guidelines to standardize the safety practices across campus. The four announcements are:
[Lubrizol fire: a vast epidemiological investigation launched Tuesday on more than 5,000 people] REALTOR® Safety Advocates Prepare Tools and Resources to Expand Awareness
“Criminal behavioral therapists are reporting a spike in crime due to the stress of COVID-19,” he says, adding that, particularly in this environment, all REALTORS® need to “be more aware.”
Legaz has four scenarios that he believes warrant REALTORS® always bringing a “buddy” to alleviate safety concerns:
– If the property is vacant – If there is poor cellphone coverage – If you have a gut feeling before a showing – If you haven’t closed a deal in a while
“There are certain things we (should) teach that will remove weakness, subservience and vulnerability, as these attract a predator,” he says. “If you haven’t closed a deal in a while, you may push through that sixth sense. If you bring a buddy in those four situations, I think it’s more doable.”
In 2019, Legaz took his concerns about REALTOR® safety and elevated it as a project while participating in the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) Leadership Academy. Because NAR believes in the importance of emphasizing safety, leadership adopted the idea, and last year, the inaugural REALTOR® Safety Advisory Committee began its work.
The committee is made up of one member from each state REALTOR® Association’s Leadership Team. Legaz serves as its chairman.
“We’re in the process of revamping the safety website and curriculum. We’re also creating a brokerage toolkit,” he says. “We believe the brokerage has the biggest impact on [REALTORS®’ ] behaviors, habits and attitudes. It’s at the brokerage level where we need to bring a change of behavior and a cultural change.”
The toolkit being considered by the committee would include a video series, with short safety features that can be shown in local meetings.
Building that cultural change could be as simple as taking five minutes in every sales meeting to show a safety video from the toolkit, or giving a REALTOR® kudos for a safety-related action, Legaz says.
“These are big goals, but we’re putting the road map out there,” he says. “We want the cultural and behavioral change to start asking ‘where did you get the lead from and is it a vacant property?‘”
Having a three-way agreement between NAR, the state associations and local associations strengthens the advisory committee’s efforts to shift the safety culture among REALTORS®, says Legaz. “If we practice it and teach it, the state and local associations can use it. It’s reinforcing each other,” he explains.
“I’ve had the opportunity to interview REALTOR® victims and many of them had that sixth sense and still pushed through, and then they were victimized,” says Legaz. “We really have to listen to that gut feeling.”
Celebrating what goes RIGHT in chemistry-lab safety www.unr.edu/nevada-to…
Recognizing it is typical in the world of chemistry-lab safety to point out what people are doing wrong, employees in Environmental Health & Safety set out to create a program to highlight what’s going right. Their Safest Teaching Assistant Awards program launched in 2017 and has sparked the interest of other universities as an example program. In summer 2020 the program was nationally recognized by a leading safety organization.
The Campus Safety, Health, and Environmental Management Association awarded the University of Nevada, Reno program first place in the category of Innovation-Safety Culture. The award was announced at CSHEMA’s 2020 conference, held online for this year.
The EH&S program selects and recognizes teaching assistants responsible for managing safety in the general chemistry, analytical chemistry, organic chemistry and introductory organic chemistry labs within the College of Science. Nearly 30 awards have been presented to teaching assistants since the program started.
Someone holding a handful of safety buttons
When the EH&S representatives show up to present a congratulatory certificate, they also provide all of the students in the lab a “science rocks” pin. EH&S Training Manager Brock A. Young notes the teaching assistants set the tone and teach safety practices, but the students make safety happen through their actions.
The acknowledgment of students recognizes the connection of laboratory safety to the overall culture of campus safety and to workforce development. As University President Marc Johnson said, “When you teach safety as an everyday practice, our graduates spread this culture where ever they go.”
Safety-First Culture: The Changing Definition of Safety in the Food Supply Chain
“Disruption” is more than an occasional buzzword in the food supply chain. Recent, rapid changes in our global economy have challenged organizations in the food industry to respond quickly to preserve a safe food supply. However, the food supply chain is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these challenges. Disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent Salmonella contamination of onions present unique opportunities to improve our collective safety culture. Many organizations within the food supply chain are stepping up to the plate with big ideas and technologies that reinforce new paradigm shifts in safety.
In response to the pandemic, a new revolutionary movement within the food supply chain has surfaced: rethinking safety compliance not as an outlier or threshold to overcome but as a primary tenet in company culture. Defining and establishing a safety-first culture is an inevitable and necessary step in the evolution of our global food supply chain, and the pandemic is an unexpected catalyst.
Safety compliance can be defined in many different ways. For our purposes, it’s the way safety is managed in a workplace, including the safety of the product, the customer, assets, employees, and the environment. The hallmark of a safety-first culture is when employees throughout the entire organization think of safety as a critical component of their day-to-day routine, a new standard in which safety involves everyone.
Safety-first culture is not an overnight process nor is it achieved by placing informational posters on the break room wall. It starts at the top and permeates throughout the organization until it is a part of the company culture as a whole. Instead of fading into the background as the latest in a series of obtrusive initiatives, safety-first culture is a total and permanent transformation in mindset. Most importantly, safety-first culture is impossible to achieve without first collecting timely, accurate data.
Ep.41 How do ethnographic interviews work?
Topics:
Explaining Ethnography. Why safety can be politically motivated. Starting your conversations with a personal connection. Why the setting of your conversation matters. How to keep your subjects talking. Setting boundaries. How to react when the interviewee is wrong.
Quotes:
“…Reflect on all these one-on-one conversations that they had everyday in their workplace and how they could utilize these one-on-one engagements to get better insights and better information that they can use to improve the safety of work in their own organization.”
“The second main principle is to get the interviewee talking and to keep them talking.”
“I can’t think of another skill that is more useful, Drew, in your role as a safety professional than knowing how to ask good questions.”
Farm chemical safety starts with the label
The words “read and follow label instructions” can be heard on many if not all of the advertisements for farm or even yard and garden chemicals on radio or television.
Those five words are the key to safety when it comes to chemical applications, according to Julianne Racine, LaMoure County Extension agent for agriculture and natural resources.
“There is a reason why for those instructions,” she said. “The dosage on the label is what has been tested to be the most effective. It’s not good for the environment not to follow those instructions and you should follow for safety reasons. The label specifies certain types of safety practices that should be followed.”
Not following those safety precautions when it comes to wearing personal protective equipment causes the most problems for farmers, said Lukas Wagner, pesticide enforcement supervisor for the North Dakota Department of Agriculture.
“People need to wear the proper safety equipment,” he said. “Some common equipment is gloves, pants, long sleeved shirt but other products might require aprons, goggles and face masks.”