June is National Safety Month: Have You Made a Full Commitment to Worker Safety?
06/01/2016
Ask someone to tell you what comes to mind when they think about June, and their response will most likely include backyard barbeques, family trips and sunshine. What people don’t typically think of is safety, which is ironic since today kicks-off the start of National Safety Month.
Observed annually in the United States in June, National Safety Month focuses on reducing the leading causes of injury and death at work, on the roads, and in the home and communities. Promoted by the National Safety Council (NSC), the month-long observance serves as a reminder that we're all empowered to make safe decisions for ourselves and those we care about. For those in the EHS industry, that means taking all necessary steps to keep workplaces safe and ensuring that all employees go home at the end of the day.
According the NSC’s most recent cumulative data, there were 4,005 worker fatalities and nearly 5 million non-fatal, medically consulted workplace injuries reported in the United States in 2014. Of those injuries, the top causes included overexertion and bodily reaction, contact with an object or equipment, and slips, trips and falls. What this data illustrates is that, like most accidents, many of these injuries could have been prevented with proper safety procedures in place. While looking at data of what’s happened in the past can provide guidance on how improve for the future, the act of being safe requires constant attention. Preventing incidents requires the active pursuit of safety every day – it must be ingrained in the workplace culture.
National Safety Month is the perfect time for companies to review their safety programs and revisit any areas that need improvement. Has it been a while since you deployed a safety training exercise? Have you fully updated your safety data sheet library with all available GHS-formatted documents? Are you sufficiently collecting data around slips, trips and near-misses to prevent further injuries from occurring? Having proper safety procedures is a company’s number one defense against worker injuries, or worse, fatalities.
Over the next 30 days, VelocityEHS will be sharing helpful information to help EHS professionals strengthen their commitment to worker safety. We invite you to follow along and learn more here on our blog, and on Twitter and LinkedIn. In the meantime, don’t forget to check-out our library of complimentary resources, including Webinars & Recordings and White Papers & Guides, aimed at helping EHS professionals meet today’s complex safety challenges. Together we can all make workplaces safer and ensure more workers enjoy all the barbeques, trips and sunshine that June offers, and beyond.
