KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, is tackling mental health for first responders.
A confidential wellness app will be available to public safety personnel and their families, powered by a company called Cordico.
The app will include a wellness toolkit, mental health self-assessments and videos on mindfulness and nutrition.
Emotional survival, financial fitness, parenting, marital resources, sleep optimization and resources to find a therapist will also be included items.
“We recognize the stressful nature of the work and its impacts on the overall wellbeing of public safety personnel and their entire family,” Wyandotte County Sheriff Don Ash said in a statement. “This app is another tool that we can use to provide support of their work and commitment to our community.”
The Unified Government is implementing the app because of how first responders are exposed to trauma frequently and tend to be more susceptible to mental health issues like PTSD, depression, anxiety and suicide, according to a release.
“The Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department has long recognized the important link between officer wellness and its impact on the residents we serve,” KCKPD Chief Karl Oakman said in a statement. “This app is another important tool in helping us remain at the forefront of changing public safety culture as we diligently work to support the mental health and wellness of our officers at work and at home.”
Join us Wednesday morning, September 15 at 11 am ET, as the Dawn of Drones Podcast continues our month-long homage to UAS/AAM industry “Movers and Shakers.”
It’s the FAA’s National Drone Safety Awareness Week – join Dawn and guests Patricia Mathes, Manager, National FAA Safety Team (FAASTeam) and Dave Kraus FAA Industry Lead & CEO/Founder of Influential Drones as we talk about their various lines of effort to increase a safety culture in drones and how they otherwise work to support the drone industry!
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Oman’s Port of Salalah recently commemorated the 16th Global Safety Day, the employee safety campaign by reaffirming its safety commitment, ‘We lead with care,’ which is at the core of its operations.
Strategically located on the trade crossroads between Asia and Europe, and serving the markets of East Africa, the Red Sea, the Indian Subcontinent and the Arabian Gulf – the Port of Salalah is operated by APM Terminals as part of the APM Terminals global terminal network. The port operates both a container terminal and a general cargo terminal.
As part of the annual international awareness-raising campaign across the APM Terminals network, Port of Salalah joined other operating ports to mark this drive towards employee safety for the 16th consecutive year.
“Safety is a joint effort and is part of how employees and other stakeholders could work together to build an inclusive and collaborative safety culture across the port’s various business units. With this as a focus, Port of Salalah engaged its employees through presentations, workshops, and activities to listen, learn and respond to its people’s needs and create a safer working environment for all,” Port of Salalah said in a statement.
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KANSAS CITY — Maintaining sanitary conditions and verification of processes through documentation are some of the top things to be prepared for during an inspection.
Also at the top of the list: having all your documents organized and readily available, and having the ability to effectively communicate the details of your programs and documentation.
“Maintaining sanitary conditions is crucial in any industry, especially when it comes to food safety,” said Candy Lucas, senior food safety director for Kieler, Wis.-based PSSI, a leading food safety and contract sanitation provider. “There’s a lot to manage in food processing plants and retailers, such as personal hygiene, allergen control, cleaning of storage areas, chemical monitoring and maintenance and pest control.”
… That includes conducting routine internal food safety assessments and ensuring they’re audit-ready at any time through PSSI’s proactive sanitation assessments, Real-Time Performance Metrics (RPM), and documentation.
“There is a big push from GFSI and FDA to drive a food safety culture within your organization,” Fryar said. “It’s becoming more of a requirement in certain audits to ensure that your documentation supports your efforts in promoting your food safety culture company wide
DETROIT (AP) — The new chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board wants governments and businesses to change the way they look at highway safety, considering the whole system rather than individual driver behavior.
Jennifer Homendy, nominated by President Joe Biden earlier this year, said such an approach works in aviation, where there were no U.S. fatalities last year. On the roads, there were 38,680 deaths nationwide, the greatest number since 2007. More than 8,700 motor vehicle deaths were reported in the first three months of 2021, up 10.5% from a year earlier. At the same time, vehicle miles traveled declined.
“The current approach, which favors automobiles and punishes only drivers for crashes, is clearly not working,” she said Monday in remarks prepared for a speech to the Governors Highway Safety Association conference in Denver. “If we are going to get to zero, we will have to do something different.”
Homendy used speeding as an example of the “Safe System Approach” to road safety. Rather than focusing solely on drivers, she questioned whether the whole system failed. She asked whether road designs encourage high speeds, or whether “ill-conceived” federal guidance has led to increasing speed limits in states. She also asked about states that take away the ability of local authorities to set lower speed limits and “manufacturers who design vehicles that can exceed 100 miles per hour or that have no speed limiters.”
ilot error and failure to follow safety guidelines probably led to the crash of an Air India Express plane in August last year, investigators say. The passenger plane with 190 people on board crashed at the Calicut airport in the southern state of Kerala, killing 21 people. The Boeing 737, which had flown from Dubai, skidded off the runway in rain and broke in two after landing.
The pilot also “did not make the mandatory announcement for the cabin crew to be seated on the first approach for landing… This is a very serious omission and compromises cabin crew”, the report said. The report added that “systemic failures” could have also contributed to the crash. “These usually occur due to prevailing safety culture that give rise to errors, mistakes and violation of routine tasks performed by people operating within the system,” it said.
Blue Sky Pastures has gone from strength to strength since winning the Westpac Supreme Award at the Southland Business Excellency Awards two years ago.
After posting losses for consecutive years, the business, previously known as Blue Sky Meats, recorded a 36 per cent growth in net profit before tax to $5 million in 2019.
… Blue Sky Pastures had also experienced significant changes in workplace culture, recording an 85 per cent reduction in injuries over the past three years, O’Donnell said.
“Before 2016, there hadn’t been a particularly good health and safety culture, there wasn’t the reporting or the management. So we put the basics in place. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” he said.
As a part of the safety awareness and skill development init ..
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Hill County Commission Administrative Assistant Sheri Williams, also the county’s safety coordinator, said the county’s WorkSafe Champions classes will begin later this month, and she’s put together a 14-person committee that will take what is learned from those classes and use it to improve the county’s safety culture.
She said Hill County has one of the highest workers’ compensation rates in the state, and she’s hoping this program will help get that situation under control, improve safety at the county and save tax-payers some money in the process.
She said the classes will be split into nine one hour to hour-and-a-half-long modules, and she’s gotten participants from every department, especially those which have particularly high workers’ comp rates.
She said the goal is for these classes to be fun and interesting, but attendance will be important and show that the county’s various departments at all levels are committed to improving the county’s work culture.
Yeah, yeah, I know. We’re supposed to have FSQ (Food Safety and Quality) verify the line before we start. But c’mon, we could see the plastic so we just removed it and then we visually inspected all the product on that part of the line. We looked everywhere for the other missing piece. We didn’t find it, so somebody probably found it not knowing what it was and tossed it out. We radioed for someone for FSQ about five minutes ago and no one came. We did what we needed: Stopped the line, found the foreign material, and now we’re running again. We only have an hour of production left and we’re almost done filling this order.”
As the operations supervisor was telling me this, I could feel my entire body become agitated. My blood began to boil, and I had to bite my tongue to avoid saying unkind and unhelpful words.
It wasn’t the first time we’d had foreign material on that line that week. And to top it off, it was the same supervisor telling me they knew the FSQ Team had to be part of foreign material incidents, yet the supervisor decided the situation wasn’t important enough to follow the written SOP on handling foreign material that we all signed off on earlier in the month in an attempt at streamlining the process to be easier to execute. I’m not sure what made me angrier—the fact we were having this conversation again or that this type of conversation always got under my skin. How was it I was blowing a gasket while the supervisor thought it was no big deal?
It all seemed to come down to a difference in beliefs. A difference in attitudes. A difference in the actions taken when no one is watching. This situation is showing the food safety culture of the organization, and everyone nearby is seeing it. This isn’t uncommon—these every-day moments are displays of the food safety culture within our organizations. These moments are an opportunity to create a new story around food safety culture.
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We’ve seen them all over the place, companies slapping a nice-sounding safety message on their trailers. When a company claims safety to be its top priority, we trust their word to be golden. But are these carriers actually adhering to their mission statements? Only they can answer that question.
Robert Kaferle, Reliance Partners’ director of safety, explains the simple secret to legitimize any safety program, from companies small to large.
“A successful company will empower their people to call out with critical comments and bring solutions to the table,” Kaferle said. “The way to instill this is from the top down, developing a program where everybody’s opinions are met and valued, everybody is empowered to bring problems to the forefront and offer solutions.”
This means everyone — all members of your organization — can voice their concerns on any issue without fear of reprimand.
From a driver refusing to haul a dangerous load to a driver manager explaining to a customer that its driver cannot deliver any faster to a maintenance professional refusing to let a truck operate using poor components, while safety is preached from the top down, its practice starts from the bottom up. Kaferle said that good decision-making should be rewarded at all levels of the organization.
Some U.S. space observers have also expressed concern about Russia’s participation in the ISS after a newly arrived space station module, Nauka, accidentally tilted the ISS in July due to a thruster misfire, causing a spacecraft emergency. The ISS quickly recovered and the crew was in no danger, NASA said at the time.
James Oberg, a U.S. space journalist who frequently reports on Russia, subsequently wrote an op-ed in IEEE Spectrum in early August asking for an independent investigation and adding he has concerns about NASA’s safety culture. Around the same time, however, both Russia and NASA emphasized the partnership and safety measures remain strong between the two space agencies.
The Associated Press and other media outlets reported the basic facts starting September 2 that the FAA had ordered Virgin Galactic to conduct no further flights pending the investigation of the July flight’s trajectory, which strayed outside of the protected airspace for one minute and 41 seconds of the 15-minute rocket ride to 53.5 miles above the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
A more detailed account published by The New Yorker magazine on September 1, written by longtime staffer Nicholas Schmidle, raised afresh questions about Virgin Galactic’s safety culture that were also detailed in Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut, the book Schmidle spent years reporting and writing. Schmidle wrote that warning lights, first yellow, later red, that appeared about a minute into the rocket burn on July 11, indicated that the craft was off-course and in danger of not having enough energy available at apogee to glide back to the spaceport where the media awaited the return of Branson and the Virgin Galactic crew.
On September 2, Virgin Galactic announced its next planned flight from Spaceport America will carry paying crewmembers, two members of the Italian Air Force, and an aerospace engineer working for the National Research Council. Virgin Galactic Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses will serve as “cabin lead in space,” providing information and instructions as the mission proceeds. The flight is also expected to carry various scientific payloads.
Virgin Galactic “may not return the SpaceShipTwo vehicle to flight until the FAA approves the final mishap investigation report or determines the issues related to the mishap do not affect public safety,” the FAA told CNBC on September 2.
The Flight Safety Foundation is set to present their 74th annual International Air Safety Summit on September 21 to 22 as a virtual event on the GoToWebinar platform.
The 2021 theme is “Safety Leadership” and will explore the need for leaders to play a vital role when it comes to managing aviation safety.
“Leadership’s involvement is key to safety cultures,” the foundation said. “While commitment to safety and operational integrity begins with management, management alone cannot drive the entire culture. For a culture of safety to flourish, it must be embedded throughout the organization—and that is why safety leadership matters.
“A safety culture can’t sustain itself without great safety leaders.”
The Maritime Union has criticised what it calls an “unreal” payout to former Ports of Auckland boss Tony Gibson.
Gibson resigned from the chief executive position in May over what he described as “persistent, personal attacks” and media criticism.
His resignation came after there were three fatalities in three years at the port, and delays in cargo traffic which resulted in one major shipping company temporarily skipping it.
A damning health and safety report into the port was released not long before Gibson’s resignation, and in August Stuff revealed that Gibson was facing two charges in relation to the death of a worker crushed under a container. … The port’s interim chief executive, Wayne Thompson, said the year had been tough, with the combined impact of the pandemic and a fatal accident having a heavy impact on employees and the business.
“For the coming year we are focused on getting the essentials right and putting the company back on track.”
That included work to improve safety and develop a strong safety culture across the business, to complete automation, and to safely get productivity back to higher levels, he said.
www.trucknews.com/transport… Fleet Safety Officer City of Edmonton Edmonton, Alta. This is one in a series of interviews with frontline workers as Today’s Trucking celebrates National Trucking Week, Sept. 5-11.
Melissa Emery Melissa Emery (Photo: Supplied) 1. What can you tell us about your job and the work it includes? The City of Edmonton has a fleet of over 4,200 vehicles and pieces of equipment, and over 8,000 drivers. As the National Safety Code coordinator, I provide strategic advice to management teams, ensuring departments meet or exceed corporate and legislative standards.
The standards I manage include safety ratings, driver and carrier profile systems, trip inspection reports, driver Hours of Service, commercial vehicle maintenance and inspections, load security, a classified driver’s licence system, medical standards, knowledge and performance testing, a driver training program, and collision investigation. I utilize coaching, communication strategies and internal enforcement to influence and motivate various branch management teams and staff to integrate safety into their everyday
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A campaign has been launched against illegal modification of buildings and unlawful partitioning of apartments to ensure residents’ safety. The awareness drive - initiated by Abu Dhabi authorities - also highlights the need for landlords to carry out regular maintenance of their properties.
The Abu Dhabi department of municipalities and transport (DMT) said it has joined hands with the Abu Dhabi Civil Defence Authority in this campaign, which targets residents, property operators, contractors and owners of all residential properties. The aim of the drive is to reduce the phenomenon of random housing in the emirate by educating people on how to implement safety measures and comply with licences and procedures for appropriate uses.
“The campaign aims to promote a safety culture and make people aware about the dangers of improperly modifying properties or failing to periodically check safety equipment,” officials said in a statement.
Authorities have sent direct messages to residents, operators and owners to emphasise on the importance of complying with regulations, with a series of awareness videos on ways to implement safety measures and rules for changing property specifications.
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Ray McIvor’s passion for and commitment to safety on the job comes from a deeply personal place.
When he was just a young man, his best friend lost his life due to a horrifying workplace accident. “Being close to him, I knew his family and I’ve seen the aftermath of it. It hit me hard,” he says.
The accident occurred in the mid-90s when safety culture was just starting, says McIvor, who had been working as a welder at the time. He immediately knew he needed to take a proactive role and improve safety conditions for everyone on the job.
“I decided I want to protect my co-workers, who are like family,” he says. “I learned through a bad experience what happened to a friend and I just don’t want it happening to another one.”
Industry-Leading Safety is a Shared Value
McIvor is now a Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) Coordinator for PCL Construction. He served as the health and safety supervisor representative on a recent mining industry project in Sudbury.
That project, now completed, was complex in that it combined two separate and distinct health and safety systems.
An Essex hospital’s maternity services facing staff shortages led to a downgrade to ‘requires improvement’ largely because of a workforce set to retire at the same time.
An extra 30 midwives are being recruited from Italy and Portugal to work at Ipswich, Colchester and Clacton hospitals in light of a Care Quality Commission inspection that found sustained periods of reduced staffing.
The shortage of staff is not related to Brexit, a spokesperson for the hospital added, but rather to do with the age profile of current midwives – many of whom are reaching retirement age at the same time.
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Four workstreams will address organisational development, safety culture, governance, and staffing and workforce.
The Programme Board had been formed to address continuous improvement in maternity services.
A report from ESNEFT to the Essex Health Overview Policy and Scrutiny Committee meeting on September 2 said: “The Trust was aware of the challenges within maternity services prior to the CQC inspection and was taking steps to improve the leadership and governance structures to support them.
www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/story/741…
Queensland farmers bear the important responsibility of ensuring they, their workers and other people on-farm are clear about their health and safety responsibilities and building a safety culture. It’s a duty they take very seriously with the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector recording an average of six fatalities each year between 2015-16 to 2019-20. It was the third highest number of fatalities in Queensland over the same period compared to about 59 each year across all Queensland industries.
Quad bikes are one of the most common agents of fatality in Queensland, and have been involved in more than 50 fatalities across the state and a variety of industries since 2011. To help reduce the risk of fatality and injury associated with quad bikes, the Consumer Goods (Quad Bikes) Safety Standard 2019 was introduced by the federal government. Phase one of the national safety standard was implemented in October 2020 and required improved information for consumers including a rollover warning label and additional information in the operator’s manual. Queensland farmers should be aware that phase two of the safety standard begins on October 11, 2021. This next stage requires all new and imported second-hand general use quad bikes to be fitted with an operator protection device or have one integrated into their design, and to meet minimum requirements for stability.
Clutter in safety procedures are a thorn in the side of many employees and contractors. We discuss the different types of clutter, what causes these procedures to become cluttered and why it’s a good idea to declutter.
EPISODE NOTES
The paper we reference today is our own research paper published in 2018 named; Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of ‘safety’ work that does not contribute to operational safety. So we have done ample research when it comes to this particular topic and we’re excited to share this knowledge with you. Hopefully you will take away from this episode a better understanding of where to start looking for (and clear out) clutter in your own workplace.
Topics:
What is safety clutter? The three C’s Contribution Confidence Consensus The paper - Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of ‘safety’ work that does not contribute to operational safety Types of duplication in safety tasks Generalization of safety tasks Symbolic application of safety tasks Attempted simplification Least common denominator Overspecification The causes of safety clutter Why reduce safety clutter? Ways to deal with safety clutter
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A new “safety culture” programme has been rolled out at a Network Rail team where racial tensions were found to have contributed to a site collision, Construction News can reveal.
As reported on CN last year, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) found a “culture of racial prejudice among members of staff at various levels of the workforce towards contractors supplied by labour agencies” as it looked into an accident where a mobile elevating work platform collided with a stationary machine on which two people were installing overhead line equipment.
Both men suffered minor injuries in the January 2020 incident in Rochford, near Southend in Essex. According to an RAIB report, there was ineffective supervision and a “catalogue of errors and omissions” at the site, while safety was undermined by poor working relationships between machine operators and controllers, including racial tensions and language barriers.
Chief inspector of rail accidents Simon French told CN that his team discovered “a shocking breakdown” of relationships.
“If the guys in one of the platforms hadn’t been wearing harnesses, they would almost certainly had been thrown to their deaths,” he added.
A small group of Boeing engineers who perform key safety tasks are raising concerns about their ability to work free of pressure from supervisors, and their comments are prompting federal regulators to take a broader look into the company’s safety culture.
The employees are deputized to approve safety assessments and handle other jobs for the Federal Aviation Administration, making their independence from company pressure critical.
According to an FAA letter, one of the employees said, “I had to have a sit down with a manager and explain why I can’t approve something.” The worker indicated that the company shopped around for another employee in the engineering unit.
Another employee reported consternation by managers when engineers find fault in designs of components because that can cause delays in delivering airplanes.
The FAA’s initial investigation ran from May until July. An FAA official described it in an August 19 letter to Boeing’s leader of safety and aircraft certification. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
“We take these matters with the utmost seriousness, and are continuously working to improve the processes we have in place to ensure the independence” of employees who work on behalf of the FAA, said Boeing spokeswoman Jessica Kowal. She said those employees “must be accorded the same respect and deference that is shown” to FAA personnel.
www.ifsecglobal.com/fire-news…
The building industry needs to change its safety culture and embrace digital information in order to rise to the challenges of improved building safety, a new report from the Building Regulations Advisory Committee (BRAC) says.
Published last month, the committee’s report picks up on Dame Judith Hackett’s concept of a ‘golden thread’ running through the lifetime of a building, as set out in her Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety. The BRAC report fleshes out what the golden thread means in terms of providing and managing key information about a building’s potential fire and structural safety, and the digital recording and processing of that information. The provisions apply to higher risk buildings – those that are more than 18m or seven storeys high and comprise a minimum of two residential units.
The report emphasises that the golden thread is not just information about a building – it also includes how that information is managed and processed, to ensure it is both accurate and accessible. It applies to the whole life of a building, from design and construction through to occupation. Crucially, the golden thread will record any changes (such as amendments to information, documents or plans), when changes were made and by whom, to help drive improved accountability.
The golden thread supports the safety case approach, where those accountable for high-rise and in-scope buildings must ensure reasonable steps are taken to manage fire and structural safety risks through prevention, control and ongoing management. They must set out and justify their approach in their safety case report, which will be assessed by the Building Safety Regulator. The intention is for the regulator and residents to be able to hold accountable those involved in the design, construction and management of a building.
Faith Technologies has earned the first place 2021 Safety Excellence Award from the National Association of Women in Construction in the subcontractor category. This is the second consecutive year Faith Technologies received this recognition, which is based on the organization’s commitment to recognizing the value of safety and creating a strong safety culture. “We are extremely proud to receive this recognition again this year,” said Rocky Rowlett, vice president of safety for Faith Technologies. “At Faith, we know that safety is a continual commitment, and we never stop working to make our employees as safe as possible on every job site every day. To be recognized by NAWIC once again means a lot, and we greatly appreciate all they do to support the leadership of women in our industry,” he stated.