INTRODUCTION TO OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH MANAGEMENT

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 INTRODUCTION
• According to Occupational Safety and Health
Administration’s Act (OSHA) every employer has a
legal obligation to make work and workplace
to be free from known hazards that could
cause serious injury and death.

• Statistics from International Labor Organization

(ILO) shows that about 250 million work
related accidents and 160 million work related
diseases occur world-wide every year, which
results to about 1.2 million death per year.

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 MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT
• Management needs to develop and demonstrate a
long term serious commitment towards
protecting every employee from injury and illness on
the job.
• Managers have to invest serious time and money into
effective safety management by developing the 5
P’s within the safety management system;
Plans
Programs
Policies
Procedures
Processes
 MANAGEMENT REASONS TOWARDS SAFETY
COMMITMENT
• Employers put time and money into the safety of
employees for one or more of the following basic
reasons;

To fulfill social imperative

The management appreciate the inherent value
of each employee, not just as a worker, but as a
corporate family member. Safety is perceived as a core
corporate value that does not change when the going
gets tough. This reason/strategy is the most
effective in the long term and when managers
value safety at this level, they naturally employ the
next two reasons.
 MANAGEMENT REASONS TOWARDS SAFETY
COMMITMENT CONTD.
To fulfill fiscal imperative
The management focuses on the financial
benefits derived from effective application
of safety programs and this reason/strategy
can be quite effective. These managers will do
whatever needs to be done proactively or
reactively to save on direct and indirect
costs of accidents. Commitment to safety may
however be subjected to rapid change when the
going gets tough.
To fulfill legal imperative
The management develop and implement
safety programs to comply with safety regulatory
bodies like OSHA and National Industrial Safety
Council of Nigeria (NISCN). These managers want
to stay out of trouble, so they do only what
has to be done to meet minimum
requirements. This reason/strategy most often
results to eye-service and it is the least effective.
 PROACTIVE AND REACTIVE SAFETY STRATEGIES

• Proactive safety strategies

These emphasizes and focus on prevention, that is doing whatever it
takes to ensure that accidents never happen in a workplace.
These strategies is often less expensive than the reactive safety
strategies because the company makes investments that results in
potential huge returns. This is a typical implementation of the
adage that says “prevention is better than cure”.

• Reactive safety strategies

These emphasizes on corrections, which is a reactive response that
occurs after an accident and usually has the purpose of minimizing
the costs associated with the injury or illness. These strategies
often cost more than proactive safety strategies.

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 EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION CHANNELS

• Effective communications is extremely important

to the goal of increasing employee involvement
in safety and health.
• Skilled safety communications will support
leadership at all levels, from the CEO to the
employee of lowest rank.
• Effective communications also create rooms for
employees to report hazards and injury in
their workplaces to their respective supervisors.

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 WORKPLACE HAZARDS
• Hazard is any workplace condition or person’s state of being
(behavior) that could cause an accident, which ultimately results to
injury or illness to an employee.
• Workplace hazards can be categorized into 5 categories;
 Materials
 Equipments
 Environment
 People
 System
Acronym for remembrance (MEEPS)
• Research findings indicate that workplace hazardous conditions
represent only about 3% of the causes for accidents in workplaces,
while unsafe work practices or behaviors represent up to 95% of
the causes for accidents.

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 WORKPLACE HAZARDS IDENTIFICATION
• To identify and control workplace hazards, two basic
strategies are used;
 Walk-around inspection
This involves daily inspection of the materials,
equipments, tools, environment and workstations at the
start of each workday by employees for
hazardous conditions. This inspection can be carried out
periodically by the safety committee.
 Job hazard analysis (JHA)
This is more effective than the walk-around
inspection because, it uncovers both the hazardous
conditions and unsafe work practices (behavior) in a work
place.
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 SAMPLE JHA WORKSHEET

BASIC JOB STEPS POTENTIAL PREVENTIVE

HAZARDS MEASURES

SAFE JOB PROCEDURE (SJP)

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 WORKPLACE HAZARDS CONTROL
• Controlling exposures to occupational hazards is the
fundamental
key to protecting workers in their workplaces.
• Hierarchy of controls has been used as a means of determining how
to implement feasible and effective controls, which includes;
 Elimination
 Substitution
 Engineering controls
 Administrative controls
 Personal protective equipments (PPE)
• The idea behind this hierarchy is that the controls method at
the top are potentially more effective and protective than those at
the bottom, and following the hierarchy normally leads to
the implementation of inherently safer systems, which
should substantially reduce the risk of accidents.
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 BE AWARE AND ALWAYS REMEMBER!
• NO HAZARDS… NO EXPOSURE… NO ACCIDENT…

• ANY SYSTEM THAT RELIES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR

IS INHERENTLY UNRELIABLE.

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INCIDENT AND ACCIDENT INVESTIGATIONS
• Incident is an unexpected event that may result in
property damage, but does not result in an injury or illness and
it is also known as “near misses” or “near hits”.
• Accident is an unexpected event that may result in
property damage, but does result in an injury or illness.
• It is important to conduct incident and accident investigations
whenever there is any accident or incident as a result of safety
management system’s weakness or failure.
• The essence of the above exercise is to find facts that would be of
great importance towards fixing the system to avoid future
occurrence of the incident or accident.
• Accident and incident investigations should not be aimed towards
establishment of blames, and that is the reason I prefer using the
term “incident and accident analysis” rather than the word
“investigations”.

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INCIDENT AND ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION PROCEDURES

• Conducting effective incident and accident investigations involves the

following steps or procedures;
 Secure the scene with a yellow tape, but in the absence of the tape,
warning signs or guards can be used.
 Gather information about the direct and indirect causes of the
accident/incident. This can be achieved by observing the
scene; interviewing eye witnesses, supervisors and co-workers;
taking photographs and video tapes of the scene; making sketches of the
scene.
 Develop sequence of events from the facts gathered from the
previous step.
 Analyze the events critically to uncover the surface and root causes of the
accident/incident.
 Address any hazardous conditions, unsafe work practices (behaviors) and
system weakness that were uncovered in the previous steps and
make necessary recommendations to the management to correct or
fix the system.

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 IMPLICATIONS OF IGNORING SAFETY
RULES AND POLICIES
• Ignoring safety rules and policies by employees could result
to the following consequences;
 Injury
 Illness
 Deformity
 Death
 Loss of income
 Downtime or Idle time
 Low productivity
 Breakdown of machines/tools
 Disciplinary action
 Loss of jobs
 RULES AND POLICIES CONTD.
• It is expected of everyone irrespective of their status
and rank to strictly adhere to the organizations’ safety rules
and policies to promote safe and healthy workplace.
• Top management team have to show strong
commitment to the organizations’ safety rules and
policies by strictly obeying the rules to show good
examples to their subordinates.
• A more severe level of discipline should be given to any top
management team for violating safety rules and policies
because such person(s) is/are creating the room for his/her
subordinates to violate the same safety rules
THANK YOU

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