"For profit" cleaning

James Burns
Yup, simple safety procedures may well be ignored at hospitals;
However it all starts with the privatecleaning contractors who only worry about getting the visible spots cleaned regularly.
This is where "for profit" becomes a bad word.
Norwalk keeps cropping up, and cleanliness is all ti takes to prevent that from happening!

Hand sanitation

Well I agree that private for-profit cleaning services are currently part of the problem in hospitals. But they aren't the primary problem. Doctors and nurses will never be a part of the cleaning staff. Very simple hand washing procedures are the most effective means of preventing the spread of infection. They are incredibly cheap to implement, but they have to be followed to be effective. Doctors simply do not follow those procedures, nor in many cases do nurses. Whenever you visit a doctor, whether at a hospital or even at a clinic, you should insist they wash their hands thoroughly or use hand sanitizer before they touch you, or touch any of the tubes or equipment attached to you. You drastically lessen the chance of picking up an infection that way, and given the number of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria residing in hospitals these days, it's vital you make them engage in proper hand sanitation.

Today's Work Environment

I've worked in the retail sector for over 20 years now. I have been a direct part of, off and on, the H&S committees, participated in numerous risk assessments & accident investigations. I've read many articles on the subject of today’s youth workers, generation x, y and now z, the trends in work place accidents, and the woes of today’s companies. I've basically come to the understanding that most of the safety related issues in today’s work environment, when it comes to worker safety, can attributed to two things, the lack of worker training AND their lack of experience. My observations indicate that most serious injuries and deaths overwhelmingly occur in the under 30 male worker demographic.

I firmly believe the bulk of the responsibility lies with the employer so don't think for a second that I am defending companies, but there are some serious issues that extend far past a company’s control. We have seen over the years the huge shift in workers and their willingness to hop from job to job at a moment’s notice. Long gone are the days where employees would stick with a company for 10, 20, even 30 years. One of the things that make it very hard for employers to train properly is that you have a new employee come into your work environment and they stay for a short time and move on. Worker training has become a huge cost, much, much more than it has been in the past. Not only is there the cost factor but a lot of times the safety training that employees does get is never put into practical use because the situations they are trained for doesn’t occur before they switch jobs. By no means am I blaming employees for the safety woes we now face in Canada but when you consider how many times employers bring in new employees there is an exponential increase in the likelihood of an injury occurring due to lack of experience. Now don't get me wrong, long term employees do have their fair share of accidents, but when you think of where the majority of the serious injuries and deaths occur I believe it is due to inexperienced workers doing work that is relatively new to them.

Today's Work Environment (cont.)

Another contributing factor is the globalization of today’s companies and the willingness of them to move their operations to countries where labor costs are cheaper, Companies that do operate in Canada face a huge dilemma when it comes to being competitive with their products and services. There is a huge struggle that companies face in retaining employees, the cost involved in constantly training new employees, and the disparity in the cost of labor that we have in Canada compared to other countries. I also believe that there are employees that do not get the proper training because companies are trying to keep their costs down. Further to that, you have supervisors that can barely keep their workforce full and a lot of times they have to pick up the slack in the work load which changes their focus from an administrative, training, mentoring focus to a work horse one.

Governments moving towards holding supervisors more accountable for the workers they supervise is a good thing but in the end it is the companies and their executives that are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the supervisors have the resources they need and the budget to carry out the training. Fining a supervisor or having them face jail time because someone below them was seriously hurt or killed is understandable but I don't believe that will necessarily fix the problem. It will just be harder for companies to get a person to be a supervisor which in the end puts more pressure on companies to keep workers safe.

It's sad really.

government scraps regulations

The present government in Victoria must take the lion's share of blame in the increasing number of workplace accidents and deaths. It has routinely eliminated any number of regulations that were designed to protect workers. Worksafe BC is but a shadow of its former self. I witnessed the removal of a fire regulation a mere four hours after I made public my intention in using it to grieve an unsafe workplace practice. Boy those guys can move fast if they think it's going to cost them a buck.

reality

Afool2cry.
good observations that you make, let me add that if a worker tends to point out safety hazards, he can also forget about hoping for a promotion!
There is a negative attitude about people "who rock the boat"!
Just be a good little boy and don your safety shoes/glasses/hat etc., and don't you worry about what Johnny is doing over there.
So called safety meetings become unusually quiet when the first suggestion is sidelined; even a lowgrade menial worker gets the drift pretty fast: use this as a paid time to sit down and shut up!

Increasing?

The article says that workplace deaths are DOWN. Why all the comments that express differing opinions?

Increasing?

Realisticman

There is a lot of conflicting information if you take it as first read. Every study I have read focuses on different aspects of the numbers so it makes it hard to compare. As a generalization I do believe that deaths per 100,000 are relatively in check or down, but I don't have reference to that in front of me I apologize.

What is interesting is that when you look at occupational safety at first glance it seems that older workers have more injuries/deaths/disease as a demographic but they are mostly due to things like prolonged exposure to materials, like asbestos for example, or debilitating injuries due to repetition w/bad ergonomics. What is interesting also is that there are more 'serious and life changing' injuries in the younger workers than occupational disease.

When it comes to deaths as a whole in the workplace I do believe that occupational disease gets added in with accidents. I also do believe that young workers have more serious accidents than older more experienced workers.

As a focus for occupational safety I think it is safe to say that there is not much that can be done to change what has already happened with the regards to the older generations and occupational disease/debilitation. What needs to be done, and in some cases it already has, is to put in place safeguards to make sure that future workers are not exposed to the things in the past that have caused occupational disease. I believe however that is the smaller of the two issues. The bigger issue at hand is the increasing number of workplace accidents in young workers. This seems to be the growing segment when it comes to occupational safety. This can only come through proper training and following the regulations set in place. This is where we as a society fall extremely short. Now don't get me wrong there are yahoos that get the training and choose to ignore it, but I do believe that is a small percentage of the bigger problem.

Just another two cents worth ...

31% of all worker deaths...

...related to asbestos? I wonder what that means?

Most workers with asbestosis or mesothelioma are off work on disability, or are retired - ie not working. Isn't that skewing the results a bit? I can think of three acquaintances who died at work - one of a health issue (heart attack?) that likely wasn't work related, one when a pile of lumber fell on him at the mill, and a third by electrocution.

I may yet become one of the statistics. I was still stripping asbestos from pipe lagging to make repairs in the early 1980s, simply because the original research indicated one had to be a smoker in addition to working with asbestos in order to get the disease. My employer had rules about stripping asbestos, but they were too onerous to follow, and every time it was done, my chief engineer just shook his head "you can't teach these young pups ANYTHING!" but nothing further was said, indicating tacit agreement with my headstrong ways.

Now, of course, I realize that I'm fine to put myself at risk if I want, but others who worked in the space after I was finished were as likely to be injured by my thoughtlessness as I was. So I haven't done that in more than twenty years, but it's probably too late for us.

Mind you, out of the roughly four hundred steam engineers I've known in my career, not one has died of asbestosis or mesothelioma, nor has it now. It would be big news, the way a single engineer at Cominco's Trail smelter also got thallium poisoning during the shutdown in 2001 years ago.

I'd love to see some facts on this. More nurses have died of violence in the workplace in BC in the last ten years (6) than workers I've personally known.

Can't google anything right now that's a propos, but here's an interesting link that says something different. I think.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/44/128.html

As R.H. Heinlein had one of his characters say so many years ago "Statistics are sharp things - don't juggle them or you'll get cut."

Regulations

I agree with Pender Paul that WCB can move quickly to avoid penalizing someone, but in fairness, I've seen a remarkable number of changes in standards and regulations in the last ten years that are far too great to keep up with.

Fire protection, governed by the NFPA codes, changes every single year, and there's a book of more than 100 pages that comes out with changes in April every year. not to mention the wholesale rewriting of codes to simplify accumulated changes in prior years. There are more than 140 separate codes for fire protection in residences and at worksites - that's 140 manuals, people - so it's no surprise that you simply can't keep up unless you're a registered professional engineer specializing in fire protection.

Building air quality is another, and one with a lot of variability. ASHRAE puts out one new book every year on a four-year rotating basis, one dealing with research, one with equipment, one with codes and the fourth with fundamentals. So every four years, there's a whole different set of codes. It's my own field, and it's remarkably difficult to keep up, never mind submitting letters and voting on recommendations, most of which are second only to guesswork. And CSA takes note and implements them for the Canadian workplace almost wholesale. Almost but not quite, so you have to study them.

Radiation safety is obscene. Hospital radiation safety officers have to requalify on certain parts of the courses every single year, and they are almost always out of date as soon as they pass. Theirs is far worse than any - I don't know how much paper is generated in their work, but every year my acquaintance carries around a 4" binder of changes - changes only! not codes - that she has to study for.

I don't blame WCB for not knowing all about every aspect of workplace safety, nor Pender Paul for relying on one aspect of it, only to find it had been changed in a matter of minutes. I don't believe it's a devious thing - merely a matter of someone in charge not keeping up with their subject material.