Clear Vision: Safeguarding Construction Workers' Eyes on the Job
A third of occupational eye injuries require trips to the emergency room, and at least 100 result in one or more days away from work.
Each year, more than 2,000 workers suffer eye injuries in the workplace that require medical treatment, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). A third of all reported occupational eye injuries require trips to the emergency room, and at least 100 of these incidents result in one or more days away from work.
One of the most at-risk groups of workers is those within the construction and labor trade industries. With this being a common and serious injury on construction sites, it’s important for both employers and workers to come together to mitigate risks and know what steps to take should an accident occur.
OSHA said modern safety helmets can offer employees better protection while doing inspections.
On December 11, OSHA announced that the agency is replacing traditional hard hats used by its employees with more modern safety helmets to protect them better when they are on inspection sites.
In 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports head injuries accounted for nearly 6 % of non-fatal occupational injuries involving days away from work.
Almost half of those injuries occurred when workers came in contact with an object or equipment while about 20% were caused by slips, trips and falls.
Dating back to the 1960s, traditional hard hats protect the top of a worker’s head but have minimal side impact protection and also lack chin straps. Without the straps, tradition hard hats can fall off a worker’s head if they slip or trip, leaving them
The Biggest Challenges for Safety Leaders, Revealed
A look at what motivates, frustrates and challenges safety professionals.
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What slows you down at work? What gets in the way of you being the best-version-of-your-leadership-self? What prevents you from achieving all your goals in any given day?
In other words, what are your biggest challenges as a safety professional?
This past year has been a challenging one, particularly for those whose jobs are to ensure the health and safety of others. And if it seems like the world is just getting more dangerous and confusing with every passing day, it’s not just you—that seems to be one of the after-effects of the pandemic. A lingering sense of “what’s going to happen next?” has become a prevalent mood within the workplace, making it all the harder to keep workers motivated.
OSHA Violations, Citations and Inspections: What You’re Reading in November 2023
A look at the month’s most poplar stories as determined by you.
Nicole Stempak
What a busy month November has been! It’s flown by for me but also feels like a mish mash of annual events. First, there was the post-Halloween sugar rush, then Thanksgiving, then shopping deals and now the first major snowfall of the season.
Throw in some unexpected car issues that threatened Thanksgiving travel, a fridge that wouldn’t cool, an annual eye exam and a girls night out to see “Mean Girls” the musical, and that about sums my past few weeks.
I’m probably sharing too much, but sometimes it’s nice to remind yourself (and others), that you’re a human who has a whole different life outside of work. It’s impossible to compartmentalize
Safety Leadership Resides in Every Employee’s Hands
Creating systems which embed safety responsibility into the fabric of every job is the path to safety excellence.
A key characteristic that distinguishes our America’s Safest Companies (ASC) winners is the core value that responsibility for a safe workplace sits squarely on the shoulders of every single person in the company.
When everyone in the organization is able to not only speak up when identifying a risk but also to take action, disasters are avoided.
Therefore, the opposite is true—when the sum part of a company’s workforce refuses to see or act upon risks, catastrophes can happen.
A very recent example of that is the situation that occurred on the island of Maui. As the initial shock of the hurricane and wildfires wears off, officials are still trying to piece together
The latest tech innovations not only are keeping workers safer but are showing a solid ROI.
It seems like almost every day a new technology hits our radar, and that’s certainly true for EHS professionals. Innovations and new tools are emerging that are designed to keep the workforce safe, or at least safer.
Many of these new solutions focus on providing more visibility into the myriad processes that comprise an employee’s workflow, whether it be applications that can determine if machinery is operating correctly, or devices that can assist employees in performing their jobs in a more ergonomically correct manner, or autonomous vehicles such as drones that can provide aerial views of particularly danger areas. On a broader scale, both internal and external environments can be improved as the result of software which can