Hazardous chemicals of concern to the government can be found in essentially all workplaces. Buying these materials in more than consumer quantities brings the purchaser under the jurisdiction of a variety of federal, state, and local agencies, who have disparate … Read More
Safety Stratus Blog
Plan Do Check Act NOT Plan Do Hope Pray – Building an Effective Safety Management System
Most safety management systems (SMS) are based on the Deming/Shewhart Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. We discussed PDCA in a previous article, but today’s article will take a closer look at the check step. Why single out the check step? Well, there … Read More
Proactive Incident Management – Do Not Wait for an Injury to Act!
In the previous Incident Management and Incident Investigations articles, we focused on two primary objectives. The first was the purpose – to learn and improve instead of blaming and punishing. The findings from an event can prove to be valuable … Read More
Safety Management System (SMS) vs. Program
In my over 30 years of assessing safety efforts, I have seen just about every good, bad, and ugly safety “program” you could imagine. Many are merely versions of command and control where the workers are given the rules and … Read More
Assessing the Quality of Chemical Safety Information
On March 11, the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Health and Safety (CHAS) held an on-line “CHAS-chat” that discussed Quality Data for Safer Experiments. Given the increasing use of general-purpose search engines such as Google to collect hazard information, … Read More
Avoiding Blame in Incident Management & Incident Investigations
In the previous article, The Purpose of Incident Management & Incident Investigations, the foundational principles of learning and improving were discussed. Further, in the article How we React Matters the concept of how organizations react to news from the workforce … Read More
