Total Environmental Health and Safety Management
ANSWER
Hello Elizabeth,
It’s clear that you’re discussing a situation where leadership needs to address an incident where human error or behavior was a significant factor leading to an injury or near-miss. Starting at the bottom of the hierarchy of controls is a logical approach to prevent such incidents from happening again. Let’s break down your analysis:
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE): Ensuring that individuals have access to appropriate PPE and that it fits properly is crucial. It’s the first line of defense and should be readily available and well-maintained.
- Administrative Controls: Reviewing and possibly revising Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) is essential. Leadership should investigate whether the individual followed the existing SOP or if changes are needed to improve clarity or effectiveness. Moreover, additional training can help employees understand and adhere to SOPs more effectively.
- Engineering Controls: While it might be challenging in emergency response situations, evaluating equipment design for flaws and considering equipment changes or additional controls is still important. These controls aim to reduce risk by design.
- Elimination and Substitution: While this may be difficult in emergency response scenarios, it’s a critical consideration. Leadership should explore if there are ways to either remove the hazard entirely or use safer alternatives. This might require innovative thinking and resource allocation.
In high-risk environments like emergency response, where time is often of the essence, finding the right balance between controls can be challenging. Prioritizing safety while ensuring swift response is a complex task for leadership. However, it’s essential to continually evaluate and improve safety measures to minimize the risk of injuries or near-misses in such critical situations.
Leadership’s commitment to safety, along with a comprehensive approach that involves all levels of the hierarchy of controls, can greatly enhance the safety and well-being of employees in emergency response and other high-risk professions.
If you have any more specific questions or need further insights, please feel free to ask.
QUESTION
Description
please respond o elizabeh
One instance that I imagine leadership starting at the bottom of the hierarchy of controls would be an instance that human error or behavior was the leading cause of an injury, illness, or near-miss. For instance, someone operated outside of standard operating procedures (SOPs) and did not wear their personal protective equipment (PPE) on an emergency fire call and was cut by a piece of glass. Leadership would need to start at PPE and ensure that the individual had appropriate PPE available to them and it was appropriately sized. Then leadership could consider if the PPE was appropriate for the instance and whether any changes would need to be made to PPE for risk mitigation moving forward. From there, with administrative controls, leadership could review the SOPs in place and see if the individual followed the SOP or if the SOP may need to be revised. After the SOP has been reviewed or revised, additional training and work process training would be necessary for all employees. Additionally, leadership may need to consider if the individual would benefit from a job rotation or if it is at all possible to reduce the frequency of the hazards associated with this incident. For engineering controls, leadership could see if the original equipment design had a flaw and change to different equipment or add a control that would greatly reduce risk. The control would need to remove or block the source at contact and it prevents the users from altering the control. In situations like emergency response, it is difficult to have engineering controls in place with in the space or environment that you are responding to. Lastly would be elimination and substitution and that would be removing the hazard completely or using a safer alternative. However, like engineering controls for emergency response, that is extremely difficult to do.
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