Safety Talk Box 07- "Health & Safety Management & PDCA Cycle"

Dear All,

Greetings of the day!

Hope all are working in a safe and healthy manner.

This is a topic introduced by Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is registered in England and Wales. IOSH is a charted body for Health and safety professionals.

With the studies given by IOSH, we being the members of organization can set standards and support, develop and connect our team workers with resources, guidance, events and training. We can be the voice of our team workers and campaign on issues that affect millions of working people.

The management system can help you manage health and safety in the organization. Most health and safety or environment management systems are based around the principle of ‘plan, do, check and act’. This is also known as Deming Cycle or Shewhart Cycle or PDCA Cycle. 

The key benefits for you and organization of introducing a health and safety management system (HSMS) are: -

·         * Complying with legislative and other requirements

·         * Helping you to deliver the policy (to make objective & targets achievable)

·         * Enabling improved management of safety and health risks

·         * Providing competitive edge (Bench-marking)

·         * Providing senergy with good business management.

Elements of Health and Safety management systems-

·         * Leadership and worker’s involvement: Leadership is an essential part of a health and safety management system- attitudes to safety and health are determined by top management and other individuals, not the organization’s size. To achieve an effective control of safety and health issues, the organization must have clear direction.

·         * Policy: Say what your intentions are—a statement of commitment by the organization’s top management to comply with safety and health law and meet ethical and professional responsibilities for safety and health.

·         * Planning: Plan what you are going to do—a plan for risk management, emergency preparedness and response, with identification of legal and other standards.

·         * Risk Profiling: Identify hazards and evaluate the risks—it’s all about assessing risks, identify what could cause harm, who it could harm and how. It enables an organization to determine what problems there are and to determine the risk management priorities.

·         * Implement the plan: How you are going to do it—a process of putting the plans in place and getting involved in all the necessary activities, from risk assessment through safe system of work, to audit.

·         * Collect data: What type of data do you need to look at? – a process of collecting proactive and reactive data, including job-specific training, risk assessments, number of incidents, injuries and ill health.

·         * Measure performance: Find out how well you’re doing – from reactive data (for example, on injuries and ill health) to proactive data (such as on inspections and training). This will give you an indication of whether your actions are working. Audits will help you to judge whether the whole system is working. You’ll need to make adjustments as necessary.

·         * Learn Lessons: Did you learn anything? – learn from findings of the incident investigations, audits and reviews, in order to find gaps in the in the management system to prevent incidents, injury and ill health and to improve the process and overall performance.

·         * Review performance: Does the system work? – an evaluation of the overall design and resourcing of the system, compared with the performance achieved. It shows the commitment to manage safely and health risks proactively so that accidents and ill health are reduced and/or the system achieves its goals using fewer resources.

Always remember that all these methods have weaknesses but some are less prone to failure than others. So implementing something in your daily works will make a big change in your site work environment.

!! You can prevent workers from being unsafe by controlling the risks !!

So control the risks & manage your site Safely !!!

THINK SAFETY WORK SAFELY

This all is for your information and further actions required

Safety Talk Box 06- Managing Safely by "Controlling Risk"

Greetings of the day!

Hope all are working in a safe and healthy manner.

This is in continuation to the e-mail “Safety Talk Box 05- Introducing Managing Safely (b)- “Assessing Risk” dt. 02^th July, 2018..

This is a topic introduced by Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is registered in England and Wales. IOSH is a charted body for Health and safety professionals.

With the studies given by IOSH, we being the members of organization can set standards and support, develop and connect our team workers with resources, guidance, events and training. We can be the voice of our team workers and campaign on issues that affect millions of working people.

 

In the last topic we had understood how to access the risks in the work environment, what’s next? It’s one thing to know that a risk exists, but you need to know what to do about it.

Risk is an ever-present part of our daily lives, at work and at home. Risk is affected by several factors. For example, the risk of falling from a tower while climbing tower will be affected by the strength of step bolts, ability to climb the tower using step bolts and method of working.

Remember that a worker who is learning to do work on live line is a hazard to himself as well as to others who are working on same line but having a qualified and experienced worker/instructor and dual controls in working helps to control or mitigate the risk.

Risk control involves introducing changes in the way we work in order to minimize risk. Whatever you plan to do, you’ll need to estimate it’s impact on the likelihood and consequences of the risk.

Remember: Risk= likelihood × consequence

Therefore, if you want to reduce risk, you need to look at:

a)      Reduce the likelihood of the hazardous event happening

b)      Reducing the consequence of the hazardous event

c)       Reducing both factors

To show how implementing risk control measures affect, we’ll use the five-point scales for likelihood and consequence that we had introduced earlier-

Let’s suppose, you are working at site for OPGW live line installation-

a)      Reducing the likelihood of the hazardous event: Suppose the likelihood of a worker (working at drum side) coming in contact with saw blade is 4 and the consequence of this is 5, so the risk rating is 20. Immediate action is required.

Providing a guard/ safety gloves will reduce the likelihood of coming in direct contact with saw blade. If we assume that the safety gloves is used most but not all of the time, the likelihood is reduced to 1 and risk rating will become 5.

b)       Reducing the consequence of the hazardous event: Suppose you are working near a place where fire-works are going on and you had placed winch machine at that place. At this stage, the likelihood of the chemical(petrol/diesel) used in winch machine, being exposed to fire is 3 and the consequence of this is 4, giving risk rating to be 12. Which in turn means measures to be taken fast! If the winch machine place is replaced by drum point then the likelihood of the same will remain 3 and the consequence will reduce to 2 giving the risk rating 6.

c)       Reducing both likelihood and consequence: If in point (a), if we use the safety gloves as well as hydraulic cutter then the likelihood will reduce to 1 as well as the consequence will also reduce to 1 which in result will make risk rating 1.

The level of risk which is left after we’ve introduced our control measures is often referred to as residual risk.

How do we decide which risk control to use?

To help decide on risk control, there’s an order or hierarchy of risk control that we can use. Baasically, risk control options at the top of the hierarchy are the preferred option because they are much less reliant on people doing something. The can also protect large number of people. We can categorize risk control options as follows-

1)      Eliminating the hazard

2)      Reducing the hazard

3)      Preventing people coming into contact with the hazard (either by putting distance between people and the hazard or by enclosing the hazard)

4)      Safe System of Work (SSOW)

5)      Personal Protective Equipment (PPE- the last line of defense)      

You must provide adequate safety signs if there is a significant risk that can’t be avoided or controlled in any other way.

Always remember that all these methods have weaknesses but some are less prone to failure than others. Usually, risk controls that rely on people to do something or believe in a certain manner are weaker than those that don’t.

!! You can prevent workers from being unsafe by controlling the risks !!

So control the risks & manage your site Safely !!!

THINK SAFETY WORK SAFELY

This all is for your information and further actions required

Safety Talk Box 05- Introducing Managing Safely (b)-"ASSESSING RISK"

Greetings of the day!

Hope all are working in a safe and healthy manner.

This is in continuation to the e-mail “Safety Talk Box 04- Introducing Managing Safely (b)- “Assessing Risk” dt. 24^th June, 2018.

This is a topic introduced by Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is registered in England and Wales. IOSH is a charted body for Health and safety professionals.

With the studies given by IOSH, we being the members of organization can set standards and support, develop and connect our team workers with resources, guidance, events and training. We can be the voice of our team workers and campaign on issues that affect millions of working people.

1)      How the risk assessments are carried out?

We’ve learned that almost anything can be a hazard in some circumstances. So when preparing to carry out a risk assessment of your workplace, it’s essential that you first make list of all the tasks you manage, including:

a)      The location where the activities are taking place

b)      The people involved in these activities

c)       The equipment being used

d)      The activities being performed

You might find it useful to draw rough sketches or take photos of the area.

When your list is complete and you have a full picture of work tasks, you’re ready to use step 1 of your risk assessment and identify which of the things you’ve listed are hazards.

Risk assessment doesn’t have to be complicated- what’s important is that you concentrate on significant hazardous which could result in serious harm or affect a number of people.

When carrying out a risk assessment, you need to:

Step 1:                  identify the hazard

Once you’ve recorded this information you can then:

Step 2:                  estimate the risk

Step 3:                  evaluate the risk

Finally, you should:

Step 4:                  record your findings

Step 5:                  review your findings

Step 1: IDENTIFY THE RISK

Here’s your chance to do a bit detective work! Walk around your workplace to see what’s going on. Look for anything that could reasonably be expected to cause harm to anyone. Examine the location or work setting or tools & equipment being used and the activities carried out. You should pay specific attention to how these activities are being carried out and whether workers are doing things as the should (in prescribed way). By doing this walk around, you’ll be more confident that you haven’t overlooked any hazards that might need to be risk assessed.

a)      Observe the location(s) you manage, check physical layout at each location and activities being carried out.

b)      Assess the activities being carried out, while start and while execution.

c)       Assess permanent (hardware fittings, OPGW) and temporary (tools, equipment) material pieces used at the location(s).

Speak to your team leader and workers (as appropriate) to find out if they consider anything in the workplace to be a hazard- they may have noticed something that isn’t obvious to you.

STEP 2: ESTIMATE THE RISK

After listing down the hazards, you need to know who might be harmed and how.

·         Who might be harmed and how?

·         How likely it is that someone could go wrong?

·         How serious would the outcome be?

It can be calculated at any scale such as Low, Medium, High.

Low(1): minor injuries, required first aid.

Medium(2): An injury required further medical assistance

High(3): Major injuries, such as amputations, dislocation of bones, or death.

Now you can estimate the level of risk involved- whether something is going to be a low risk or high risk.

Remember: Risk= likelihood × consequence.

STEP 3: EVELUATE THE RISK

So now you have estimated the risk and worked out your risk level- what are you going to do about it? International occupational safety and health or labour laws expect all engineers to do every thing “reasonably practicable” to protect people from harm.

Usually the higher the risk level, the more serious the risk is and the more likely you’ll need to take action. To make it easier to decide on the urgency of the action, you can allocate an action level to each level of risk. This way of estimating and evaluating risk is called ‘risk matrix’ approach- it’s a commonly used tool in risk assessment.

Let’s take an example to understand it properly-

Take a scenario, a worker(Name: WD) is working under the tower to lift the tools up to the worker(Name: WT) working on top of the tower. Here, WD working under the tower is in itself a hazard. You have to evaluate the risk of WD and likewise other workers working under the tower.

Likelihood:

1 means: WD is standing/ working outside the tower body and wearing helmet. (1 in 1000 chances of hazardous event to happen)   

2 means: WD is standing/ working inside the tower body and wearing helmet. (1 in 100 chances of hazardous event to happen)

3 means: WD is standing/ working inside/ outside tower body without helmet. (1 in 10 chances of hazardous event to happen)

And by mistake if a lever block (chain pulley) falls from top of the tower with what WT was working.

Consequences:

Low(1): minor injuries, required first aid.

Medium(2): An injury required further medical assistance

High(3): Major injuries, such as amputations, dislocation of bones, or death.

                                                                                  RISK MATRIX (3×3 MATRIX)

3    2   1	3	6	9
	2	4	6
	1	2	3
	1         2            3

                           Increasing Consiquence↑                  Increasing Likelihood→

In this case:     1 (in green colour) means: If lever block (chain pulley) falls from top of the tower, WD will get minor injury (consequence) because (likelihood) WD is standing/working outside the tower body by wearing helmet then in this case, proper control measures need to be taken and reviewed.

Results evaluation:

            Results 1-2: No action required (No further action, but ensure controls are maintained and reviewed)

                            Results 3-4: Action required (Look to improve)

                            Results 5-9: STOP (IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED) (Either lower down the likelihood or consiquences level)

STEP 4: RECORD YOUR FINDINGS

Now that you have assesed all the risks, you’ll need to record your findings. In general, it’s helpful to record:

·         Details of the person carrying out the risk assesment

·         The date and time of the assesment

·         Details of the location(s), equipment and activity they are assessing

·         The hazards they’ve identified, together with the risk level.

·         Existing control measures and how well they

·         Additional control measures and the residual risk

·         The date for review of the assesment.

STEP 5: REVIEW YOUR FINDINGS

As we all know, things change- for example, work procedure upgrades, we buy new equipment and workers come & go. The same applies when new information comes to light such as instrument and hardware you use at site. When changes like these are identified, you’ll need to review your risk assesment. Make sure your risk assesments are up-to-date, taking of any changes or any new information. Where risk ratings are low, you still need to review assesments to make sure they stay low.

Getting It Right

Risk assesment is a simple process, there are some basic rules to follw-

·         Make sure your assesment is suitable and sufficient to cover all risk assesment.

·         Risk assesment involves making a judgment about risk. Better data helps in better judgment.

·         It’s essential to involve the people whose activities you are assessing.

·         Make sure that your risk assesments are relevant to the local situation at your site.

·         Where people work alone or encounter an unpredicticable event, you should consider how competient your workers are to undertake such roles and these risks.  

Research carried out in Europe found that the average cost for a minor accident in 16 times higher than the cost the related preventive measure.  

Always remember that accidents and ill health at workplace can have devastating effect- it can cause small or a serious injury, can ruin lives and your name and fame.  

!! You can prevent workers from being unsafe by accessing the risks !!

So manage your site Safely !!!

THINK SAFETY WORK SAFELY