Bumble Bee Tuna cited after worker cooked in oven
Accidents always happen, which is why it is important to make sure your company has safeguards that protect workers from even the simplest of accidents.
Bumble Bee Tuna was cited by OSHA this week for the accidental death of a worker who was cooked to death inside a huge industrial oven at its Santa Fe Springs, California plant.
The worker was trapped inside the oven after a fellow employee assumed he had gone to use the restroom. The accident wasn’t discovered until almost 2 hours later, but by then it was too late.
Read the entire story below:
OSHA cites Bumble Bee tuna for worker cooked in oven
Latest scores show incremental progress in hospital safety
According to the Leapfrog Group, U.S. hospitals are only incremental progress when it comes to dealing with accidents, errors, injuries and infections that hurt or kill their patients.
The national, independent non-profit assigns letter grades to about 2,500 hospitals across the nation, a grade known as the Hospital Safety Score, based on hospital safety data and reviewed by a panel of eight hospital safety professionals.
Maine edged out Massachusetts in the 2013 survey as the state with the safest hospitals, as 80 percent of that state’s hospitals received a grade of “A.” Completing the top five states were Minnesota, Virginia, and Illinois.
Read the entire article:
Latest scores show incremental progress in hospital safety
Between the sheets…the Safety Data Sheets!
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Mac’s Safety Space.
Every once in a while I like to take questions from the studio audience and today I’d like to address the question of where one has to have copies of their Safety Data Sheets (in the interest of history, I’m going to resist using the “old” term Material Safety Data Sheets) in each department.
So, the short answer is “no,” there is no specific requirement to have copies of the SDS in each department. But there is some contextual stuff that requires a bit of diligence, so I think a quick review of the language in the Hazard Communications Standard may be useful (the section of the Standard dealing with SDS is 1910.1200(g) – we’re just looking at the portion that discusses how employers are expected to manage them):
1910.1200(g)(8) The employer shall maintain in the workplace copies of the required safety data sheets for each hazardous chemical, and shall ensure that they are readily accessible during each work shift to employees when they are in their work area(s). (Electronic access and other alternatives to maintaining paper copies of the safety data sheets are permitted as long as no barriers to immediate employee access in each workplace are created by such options.)
1910.1200(g)(9) Where employees must travel between workplaces during a workshift, i.e., their work is carried out at more than one geographical location, the material safety data sheets may be kept at the primary workplace facility. In this situation, the employer shall ensure that employees can immediately obtain the required information in an emergency.
1910.1200(g)(10) Safety data sheets may be kept in any form, including operating procedures, and may be designed to cover groups of hazardous chemicals in a work area where it may be more appropriate to address the hazards of a process rather than individual hazardous chemicals. However, the employer shall ensure that in all cases the required information is provided for each hazardous chemical, and is readily accessible during each work shift to employees when they are in their work area(s).
So, basically it all really boils down to that last statement. You need to have SDS information for each hazardous chemical and that information has to be readily accessible to employees when they are in their work area(s). As I think we’ve discussed in the past (but if we haven’t, we’re going to, starting now), the Hazard Communication Standard is a performance standard (much like many of the Joint Commission standards). The HazComm Standard does not specify much in the way of compliance strategies, but rather focuses on establishing certain expectations and then each organization has to figure out how to meet those expectations from an operational standpoint. You can go about this pretty much any way that you want—as long as you can effectively provide access to SDS information for employees. If you can effectively provide access without having copies of SDS at the department level, then that’s what you can do. And if you can’t, then you have to come up with a strategy that does—which for the department-level access means copies of the SDS in the department. And to keep things on a front and center kind of standing, I might suggest that the effectiveness of the process for providing access to SDS information would make a very good performance measure upon which to evaluate the effectiveness of your Hazardous Materials and Waste Management program. Test the process—see if folks can retrieve the information they need without too much difficulty. If it’s a web-based program, ask them to show you how they work the process. Fax on demand? Same thing—have staff show you the process works. That way you “know” that you have an effective process.
New OSHA resource on protecting workers from combustible dust fires
OSHA has released a new resource to help keep emergency responders and facility workers safe when handling emergencies involving combustible dust. The booklet, titled Firefighting Precautions at Facilities with Combustible Dust, explains the associated hazards of combustible dust and outlines best practices for preparations to make prior to a response, as well as the effect of these preparations during incidents, according to an OSHA press release.
The booklet notes that “just about any solid material that burns can be explosible when finely divided into a dust” and states that a flash fire will occur when combustible dust that is dispersed in a cloud in proper concentrations is ignited. This flash fire can cause an explosion when confined in an enclosure such as a dust collector, processing equipment, conveyor, room, or building. According to the booklet, responders can inadvertently increase the chances of combustible dust explosions by using tactics that cause dust clouds to form, introducing air to create an atmosphere for explosions, applying the incorrect or incompatible extinguishing agents, or using tools and equipment that can become an ignition source.
More than 130 workers have been killed and nearly 800 workers have been injured in combustible dust explosions in the past three decades, according to OSHA. Many of these incidents may have been avoided with proper training and preparation for responding to such emergencies. OSHA’s newest resource should help facilities to avoid future worker injuries and deaths by providing the information necessary for safe practices with regards to combustible dust.
Access the OSHA booklet titled Firefighting Precautions at Facilities with Combustible Dust here.
Whitepaper identifies strategies for safer healthcare work environments
Many healthcare workers are at risk of being bullied, harassed, demeaned, ignored, or physically assaulted or injured when providing care, making it difficult to provide safe healthcare for patients, according to a new whitepaper from the Lucian Leape Institute at the National Patient Safety Foundation. The paper notes that both emotional and physical harm occur at higher rates in the healthcare workforce than in other industries, and disrespectful treatment of healthcare employees increases the risk of patient injury.
The authors of the report recommend the following strategies to shape safety culture and bring meaning to workers’ daily activities:
- Strategy 1: Develop and embody shared core values of mutual respect and civility; transparency and truth telling; safety of all workers and patients; and alignment and accountability from the boardroom through the front lines.
- Strategy 2: Adopt the explicit aim to eliminate harm to the workforce and to patients.
- Strategy 3: Commit to creating a high-reliability organization (HRO) and demonstrate the discipline to achieve highly reliable performance. This will require creating a learning and improvement system and adopting evidence-based management skills for reliability.
- Strategy 4: Create a learning and improvement system.
- Strategy 5: Establish data capture, database, and performance metrics for accountability and improvement.
- Strategy 6: Recognize and celebrate the work and accomplishments of the workforce, regularly and with high visibility.
- Strategy 7: Support industry-wide research to design and conduct studies that will explore issues and conditions in health care that are harming our workforce and our patients
Read the entire white paper here.
