Problems with Safety Efforts

McSween notes four common problems that seriously hinder safety efforts  

There cannot be any pressure to hide injuries and incidents in successful safety efforts. It is important for organizations to learn 

Safety award programs typically do not reinforce safe behavior on the job. As noted above, awards and incentives tend to influence employees not to report injuries. Many organizations base their awards on outcome measures (injury statistics) rather than process measures—people s compliance with safety procedures on the job (McSween, 1995, p. 15). 

Dependence on Management or Staff for Planning and Decision Making. 

Many companies expect managers to enforce safety rules and procedures. Consequently, employees tend to rely on managers to ensure safe behavior rather than look out for each other. Employees are not adequately challenged to improve safety, and many of them tend to look to someone else for primary responsibility for their safety. 

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Some safety engineers have become obsessed with fears of safety problems with hot asphalt, although very few injuries or accidents have been traceable to it over the several centuries that it has been used industrially. Asa result, there have been many efforts to substitute cold asphalt putties for hot asphalt as a membrane material. These materials and their limitations have been discussed above. As a membrane for floor installations, such putties are often usable providing they are never subject to a standing liquid head, but less frequently for trenches and pits. Remember, if asphalt emulsions are put in service before all the water has dried out of them, they can reemulsify and may be washed out. 

While there are certainly some very effective safety engineering programs, too many expend a large amount of resources with little return on the investment in terms of improved safety. To fix a problem, we first need to understand it. Why are safety efforts sometimes not cost-effective lliere are five general answers to this question ... 

The combination of the decrease in safety efforts along with loop B2 in which fixing the problems that were being found increased complacency, which also contributed to reduction of system safety efforts, eventually led to a situation of unrecognized high risk. 

A sixth problem confronting the system safety effort is the lack of qualified system safety engineers and managers, even for system safety efforts in place at the beginning of the 1990s. If the system safety effort is to expand to meet the challenges of the next century, many more personnel will be required. Additionally, they will all need to know system safety objectives, concepts, and methods in order to participate in SSWGis and to interface with the overall effort. 

List the eight problems associated with the system safety effort. 

The first seeds of the patient safety movement were planted more than twenty years ago in the work of individual practitioners who applied specific approaches to improving care in their respective domains. In the 1970s, anesthesiologists amid media and malpractice pressures, desired to minimize adverse outcomes. They launched an effort to improve their practice through systematic research initiatives and advanced technology (Pierce, 1996). Reporting efforts and discussions of problems with medications began to appear in the pharmacy world at the same time (Cohen, 1975). 

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