Archive: February 2010

Slips and falls are one of the most frequent causes of accidents, both on and off the job. Each year in the United States, more than 300,000 people suffer disabling injuries from falls. Slips and falls can be fatal as well; they rank second only to automobile accidents, causing nearly 12,000 deaths a year. To avoid getting hurt from falls, avoid rushing and remember the following:

Based on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC’s) recommendations, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) developed guidelines for employers to assist them in preparing their workplaces to minimize transmission of a pandemic virus (the focus of these recommendations were for a healthcare facility). These recommendations include vaccinations.

Your hands are one of your most valuable assets. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to touch, hold, feel, write or gesture. In fact, you couldn’t do much of anything. Too often, however, we take them for granted.

When you start to investigate options in keeping employees safe when working at elevations, you start to realize there are strong benefits to using Guardrails to keep employees from a potential fall. Guardrails give an employee freedom of movement to stay productive in comparison to the limited working distance of a lanyard or self-retracting lifeline.

According to the U.S. Eye Injury Registry, 43% of eye injuries occur within the home, but 90% of these eye injuries are preventable if you take safety precautions and use a little common sense. Many times, all that’s needed to prevent vision loss and blinding injuries is a pair of properly-fitting goggles.

OSHA is proposing to revise its Occupational Injury and Illness Recording and Reporting (recordkeeping) regulation by restoring a column on the OSHA Form 300 to better identify work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs).