Safety Management

Safety Management

“Safety First” this is the saying that every company impost to their business, it maybe because it is one way to boost the morale of their workers.

We all know that safety is everyone’s concern because no one wants to suffer in accident that may cause injuries, illnesses or in worst case fatalities. Safety may be defined as an condition of being safe or it’s easy to say freedom to accident. This safety may achieve through safety management.

What is Safety Management?

Safety management is an act or an art of managing the safety elements in the workplacein order to avoid or eliminate the accident. Actually this safety management is not easy as we think that it just eliminating the accident, however this focus in almost all of area in one business like hazards in workplace, chemicals, machines, atmosphere, accident investigation, cause and effect of the accident, controlling hazards, procedures for safety, recording accidents, and some other aspects regarding safety.

Accident

Accident may occur anywhere and anytime, in different jobs or duties and even what we are doing. Actually no one wants to involve in accident, it is because no normal person wanted to hurt his/her self and no one wanted accident to happen. “Accident is defined by the Occupational Safety and Health Center (OSHC) as something that is unplanned, uncontrolled, and in some way undesirable; it disrupts the normal function of a person or persons and causes injury or near injury. During an accident, a person’s body comes into contact with or exposed to some objects, other person causes injury or creates the probability of accident.” Actually this accident also is unforeseen and no one wanted to occur that may cause damage, injuries or death. 

According to OSHC there are 6 types of accidents. These are as follows

Fall to bellow

Struck Against

Fall on the same level

Caught in

Caught on

Struck by

Causes of Accidents

Actually accidents has two primary causes the unsafe act and the unsafe condition.

Unsafe Act is improper human behavior, action or performance that may violate safety rule. According to OSHC “unsafe act is a human action that departs from a standard or written job procedure or common practice, safety rules, regulations, or instructions. It is also a violation of a commonly-accepted safe procedures and or processes.” Example of unsafe act was horse playing, disregarding Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), using defective equipment and many more. Actually this unsafe act has three contributing factors these are, improper attitude, Physical or body limitations and the third one is lack of knowledge and skills on the job that they are doing.

“Unsafe Condition as the OSHC defined, it is the physical or chemical property of a material, machine or the environment which could result in injury to a person, damage or destruction to property or other forms of losses.” This unsafe condition is most probably can be eliminated or it could have been guarded or prevented. Some example of unsafe condition was slippery floor, excessive noise, defective tools, equipment, Inadequate warning systems, working in confined space and many more.

Can Accident be prevented?

 According to OSHC in a typical accident 98 percent is preventable and 2 percent is unpreventable. It means that there is a big chance to eliminate different accident in our daily life. Actually at that 98 percent it is compost of unsafe condition that has 10 percent and unsafe act which has 88 percent. As we can see we must addressed both human and technical factors for the prevention of accident.

You may watch these video for more information.

(Answer the Quiz below and enjoy it! :-))

Guide Question:

What did you realized when you read this lecture?

About the Author:

Mark Gerald M. Quinia is the author of this lecture entitled Safety Management. He is an Industrial Engineering Graduate at Batangas State University. He is also currently enrolled at Rizal Technological University taking up Master of Science in Engineering Education major in Industrial Engineering. He was trained in Basic Occupational Safety Health training thru the Occupational Safety and Health Center under the Department of Labor and Employment. The author is currently working at Batangas State University as an instructor; he loves to make filipino poems and dream to become a great Filipino poet someday.