Google “safety culture” and you get about 1,600,000,000 results in 0.95 seconds. Safety and health managers have long known the importance of culture – the organization’s values, beliefs and leadership - on safety, morale, productivity, engagement, presenteeism and absenteeism. Culture has been at the top of safety and health issues for the past ten years at least.
Most readers are familiar with the common phrase, “The errors of our ways.“ So why am I talking about the intention of our ways -- not errors – in this article?
It is called the Batter’s Eye. You can find one in every Major League Baseball park and stadium. But the question is, where are they located? And the next question is, how do they work?
A rather simple description of culture is: That’s just the way we do things around here. From a safety & health perspective, the way things are done stays the same until someone or some group, with the competency and power to make change, becomes dissatisfied with the S&H status quo.
An employer-sponsored behavioral health program can reduce symptoms in employees with depression and anxiety, reports a study in the October Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
After the tenth suicide among its ranks this year, the New York Police Department has decided to offer its officers free and confidential mental health services.
Police Commissioner James O'Neill and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced today that no-cost mental health counseling and prescription services would be available to officers through a program called Finest Care, which will be coordinated by New York-Presbyterian.
A new study out of North Carolina State University sheds some interesting light on how employees – some of them, anyway – view their robotic co-workers.
They blame them for workplace accidents – if they believe the robots are autonomous.
Researchers showed study participants scenarios of several workplace accidents involving both a human and a robot.
Young adults who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be more likely to experience a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or major stroke event by middle age, raising the risk as much as other better-known risk factors, according to new research published in Stroke, a journal of the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association (AHA).
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has published a new webpage on Suicide and Occupation. The page includes factors that are linked to increased risk of suicide among occupations, ways to prevent suicide in the workplace, and a host of other resources. There were more than 47,000 deaths by suicide in the U.S. in 2017. It was the second leading cause of death among people 10 to 34 years of age.
Yes, this is a story about errors - plural - made by one person, me. I’m not going to beat myself up here. James Reason, professor emeritus at the University of Manchester (UK), and one of the seminal authorities on human error, reminds us that most errors are caused by good, competent people who are trying to do the right thing.