Environmental Health and Safety

RSS

We all love our spreadsheets. For years, EHS professionals have relied almost exclusively on spreadsheets to collect, analyze, and share data. We can do just about anything we want with our spreadsheets, and if you know visual basic, you can really have fun with them.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article ran on the ISHN website back on May 20, 2000. We thought it would be interesting to present it to you today, some nineteen years later, as a means of comparing the occupational safety and health profession today with the way it was perceived by the people in it nearly two decades ago. Additional note: We've changed the name of the American Society of Safety Engineers to its current moniker, American Society of Safety Professionals, in order to avoid confusion.

Broadly speaking, a confined space is an area that is large enough for a worker to enter and do work, but that is difficult to get in and out of easily, and not designed or intended for regular occupancy.

We do what we do to obtain, avoid, or escape certain consequences. Consequences we work to obtain are termed "positive reinforcers." Consequences we attempt to avoid are "negative reinforcers."

Why do so many workers and building occupants die from falling through plastic skylights? Why do we have a BLS.gov line item on falling through skylights, average about 16-20/year work deaths in the USA through 2017?

The New View is fundamentally the application of systems thinking to workplace health and safety. It considers safety an emergent property of the system. So what does that jargon mean? Instead of focusing on an individual thing, the organization steps back and takes a broader view.