Supervisors.Directing safety

One measure of the extent to which staff might have come into contact with the actual risks of working on the railways was directly through their own involvement with accidents. The workforce were asked if they had ever experienced an accident and managers, supervisors, and safety representatives were questioned about the extent of their involvement when accidents did occur. The majority of the workforce had experienced an accident, the exception being signals and telecommunications department staff. Only one person considered that they had personally suffered a serious accident, a member of the mechanical and electrical engineering department who had strained his back and had been off work for an initial period of ten weeks and for another seven weeks later. 

The routine investigation into accidents and near accidents is usually carried out by the first-line supervisor and safety representative, or in case of near accidents, by the persons directly involved. In Chapter 12, we discussed problems with the quality of the supervisors accident reports. The documentation in the reports focuses on the late phase of the sequence of events. There is often an arbitrary and incomplete documentation of deviations in the early phase of the sequence of events and of causal factors. This documentation thus suffers from problems of reliability and coverage. 

Supervisors build safety on the foundation of the relationships they establish with their direct reports. To support employee and... 

It is further stated that any individuals who have an apparent illness or open lesions that could in any way affect the safety and quality of drugs shall be excluded from direct contact with the pharmaceutical products being prepared. It may be necessary to assign these individuals temporarily to other duties until they are in satisfactory health. It is imperative that the employees be instructed to report any of the foregoing conditions to their supervisors. The supervisory personnel have additional responsibility to ensure that this requirement is met. 

Improvement Item Reverse 911 was not activated in a timely manner due to access available only by Emergency Management personnel. This weakness has been corrected so that Reverse 911 can now be activated through direction from Dispatch supervisor or authorization of Incident Commander. Capability will also be established at North Augusta Public Safety and Aiken Public Safety dispatch centers. The database used to initiate calls was five years old. This was identified post incident, and updated information is now available... 

Accidents involving physical hazards can directly injure workers and can create additional hazards, for example, increased chemical exposure due to damaged protective equipment, or danger of explosion caused by the mixing of chemicals. Site personnel should constantly look out for potential safety hazards, and should immediately inform their supervisors of any new hazards so that proper action can be taken [1,21,31]. 

Safety, Loss Prevention and Security are the direct responsibility of line management and are important measures of managerial performance. In order to insure that every employee is prepared to work safely, every supervisor has the responsibility to provide a safe work environment with proper equipment and adequate training. Each supervisor also has the responsibility, through personal example and the involvement of all employees, to create a climate in which everyone shares concern for the safety and security of their fellow workers and for the prevention of losses. 

The basic version of the NMMS framework described above shows its functioning at the level of the safety department in an organisation. The learning process thus takes place at the level of "end-users" (e.g. operators, etc.), their direct supervisors and the local safety staff. Feedback loops which make this learning process possible are not. only the "evaluation" loop back to module 1, but also several smaller loops within the framework, e.g. when the purpose is modelling, module 6 may very well influence module 4, which in turn may change the ways in which the "input" modules 1,2 and 3 operate. 

Officially, OSHA will hold the direct supervisor responsible for the safety of its workers. However, OSHA can also fine and hold responsible the Owner for not having made sure the contractor is working safely. OSHA certainly has the authority to shut down a work site if the safety record warrants it. This is not in the best interest of anyone and therefore demands excellent safety performance during construction. 

Students who use this lab manual are laboratory technicians employed by a fictional consulting firm called the I.O.N.S. Corporation. The I.O.N.S. Corporation is directed by a chief executive officer by the name of Claire Hemistry, or C. Hemistry. The I.O.N.S. Corporation has a safety officer by the name of Ben Whell who issues a safety report for each project for which special safety considerations may be an issue. The instructor is the laboratory supervisor. Ms. Hemistry enters into contractual agreements with fictional clients that are faced with the problem or situation at hand. Industrial and academic consultants write memos giving the I.O.N.S. technicians the necessary background information. One of the consultants, the client, or Dr. Hemistry provides a standard operating procedure (SOP), or other procedure, that must be executed in order to solve the problem. The students then perform the lab work to solve the problem, keep a laboratory notebook according to company protocols, and write a report memo to the client on I.O.N.S. stationery reporting their results and recommendations, if appropriate. 

It is, of course, an usual practice to have a chemical laboratory directly under the command and supervision of a senior cadre laboratory technical personnel who should be consulted, as and when required, for his expert opinion and advice. It is, however, pertinent to mention here that two vital universal truths and norms, namely first, exercise of utmost care and secondly, adoption of strict safe-working procedures, should be the prime responsibility of each and every individual working in a chemistry laboratory. No compromise, whatsoever, must be made with regard to even an iota of doubt as to the safety of a proposed experimental procedure yet to be undertaken. Liberal consultation, advice from senior research personnels, academic supervisors should be sought freely and frankly without the slightest hesitation in one s mind. 

The supervisor now develops something but this again makes no recourse to the incident in terms of practice or people, rather it is constructed with direct reference to the impact on the target of zero, and belittled, considered stupid. Whilst the safety incident is positioned as a negative event, it is only considered as negative through its direct association with Brand Zero. 

The managanent principles that management team members use in daily supervision of production, quality control, or any other operation are the same when managing safety in the workplace. In production, the supervisor plans, organizes, directs, and controls operations to produce a product, while in safety and loss prevention, the supervisor plans, organizes, directs, and controls the safety and loss prevention function in the workplace. Basic management skills utilized in production and quality are transferable to the safety and loss prevention function. 

For example, a construction crew may be erecting a new administration building at a process plant site. The contract workers who pour the concrete and erect the steel work will not have any contact with the people who work on the processes, nor will they be directed by the site supervisors. Therefore, they are true contract workers. At the other extreme is a maintenance worker who has worked on the facility for many years and who reports directly to the facility s supervision. Even though this worker may be on contract in an administrative sense, regulatory agencies such as Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would regard him or her as being equivalent to a full-time employee. 

It is recommended that physicians being trained in this technique perform a minimum of 20 lead extractions as the primary operator under the direct supervision of a qualified training physician. Exposure to the venous entry site, as well as femoral retrieval techniques, should be included. The supervisor should have performed 75 lead extractions with an efficacy and safety record that is consistent with published data. 

Safety cannot be policed. Security can, and that is why security staff are called security officers or the police are called police officers, traffic officers, etc. Safety does not belong in that category any more, so a positive step toward improving the safety culture would be to remove the title officer from the safety staff. The safety department is not a police or security force. They should identify deviations from standards and hazards and notify the supervisor. It is the job of the supervisor, not the safety department, to give direct instructions to anployees. 

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