HSE People - Health and Safety Community

Welcome Our Respected Readers,

First Aid to Save a Life Pakistan is doing their best to create an awareness on Sudden Cardiac Arrest and AED programs at masses level in Pakistan. Due to the lack of information and deficiencies in regulations, organizations don’t intent to follow or adopt to a current or upcoming situations where physically they don’t see losses as they don’t have proactive approach and only favors reactive management. But First Aid to Save a Life Pakistan will continue with the same courage and spirit but with more coordinated and well esteemed professionals to pass on the message, what Sudden Cardiac Arrest is and why AED program is necessary or how it can prove to be beneficial for companies and their workforce.

We will say a lot with more details on this but at the moment we would like to collect some facts to plan our future actions and will appreciate your kind participation in our survey.

Because the survey poll can not be merged here into this post, you are requested to visit below link to cast your vote to help us gather true data to work on.

Survey on SCA and AED

 

To Your Success,

Faisal Javed Mir

Respected Readers,

With the approach of summer, different health and safety organizations release some precautionary alerts on hyperthermia. In our today’s post we will throw some light on it.

Summer can bring heat waves with unusually high temperatures that last for days and sometimes weeks. We very often forget about children, those may be at risk during hot weather as it is heightened for children left alone in vehicles. Hyperthermia (heat-stroke) is the leading cause of non-crash vehicle deaths for children under the age of fourteen. As there are no regulated facts available in Pakistan so very often we don’t come up with preparation about these things because we were never told by city, provincial or federal governmental organizations about the health related statistics and we are less fortune that not a large number of independent NGOs are working in this regard those record such events and tell us some facts so we prepare ourselves in time and educate people around us where we live and work.

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human being can ALTER his LFIE by ALTERING his ATTITUDE.”

Excessive heat may injure the skin or deeper tissues, and in extreme cases, may so upset the working of the body that death may ensue.

Our bodies work most efficiently within a normal temperature range of 36-37° C (97-99° F) In order to keep a level temperature the body must retain heat when the environmental temperature is cold and lose heat when it becomes hot.

Body heat is under the control of a temperature control centre (“thermostat”), situated at the base of the brain, which automatically adjusts the mechanisms that keep the balance between heat loss and heat gain. This word is made up of “hyper” (high) and “thermia” from the Greek word “thermes” which is heat.

The proactive organizations do realize what can affect their workforce and issue health alerts to avoid such incidents in their workplaces. Hyperthermia can be one of the subject on which earlier health alert can be shared with workforce and as global warming is increasing so more unusual and extreme weathers can pose some serious health risks to workforce.

Thanks & Best Regards,

Faisal Javed Mir

As-Salam-o-Alaikum and very warm welcome to All,

In our earlier posts we talked about; history of CPR and Personal Safety & First Aid. In our today’s post we will tell who Mr. Karl Lendsteiner was.

Mr. Karl Landsteiner was an American biologist and physician who distinguished the blood into groups in 1901. He developed, the Rhesus factor, in 1937 along with Alexander S. Wiener. He also discovered polio virus, in 1909 with Erwin Popper. In 1930 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

                                                                                       

In 1900 Mr. Karl Landsteiner found out that the blood of two people under contact agglutinates, and in 1901 he found that this effect was due to contact of blood with blood serum. As a result he succeeded in identifying the three blood groups, A, B and O, which he labeled C, of human blood. Mr. Karl Landsteiner also found out that blood transfusion between persons with the same blood group did not lead to the destruction of blood cells, whereas this occurred between persons of different blood groups. Based on his findings, 1907 the first successful blood transfusion was performed by Reuben Ottenberg at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Today it is well known that person with blood group AB can accept donations of other blood groups, and that persons with blood group O can donate to all other groups. Individual with blood group AB are referred to as universal recipients and those with blood group O are known as universal donors.

 

Thanks & Best Regards,

Faisal Javed Mir

As-Salam-o-Alaikum and very warm welcome to All,

In our today’s post we will share with you what is most important and generally speaking first thing to be looked after before we do any help.

Your (responders) personal safety is the most important step in first aid scenarios. We have to remember that emergency scenes can be dangerous or there may be associated hazards. We may or may not be in position to highlight all the existing hazards where this incident occurred but we have to be careful to ourselves.

Put your future in good hands – your own.

We should make sure that emergency scene is safe for ourselves and there are no visible hazards present or developing situations exists, those may harm us. Once you are sure your personal safety is intact, you can anticipate rescuing the victim.

Don’t feel shame because this is not ethically wrong. You have every right but first to secure yourself, and then help with a cause to save victims’ life. If the scene is not safe, you should think about yourself. If you failed to think about your safety at first and jumped into the situation, then rescuers may have to recover two victims from scene instead of one.

All organizations like American Heart Association (AHA), European Resuscitation Council (ERC), Resuscitation Council UK (RCUK), British Heart Foundation (BHF), Australian Resuscitation Council (ARC), American Red Cross (ARC), Red Cross and others emphasizes the needs of personal safety in their published guidelines.

There we also have some supporting stories from all around the world to avoid secondary accidents. One of the American Road Traffic Safety organizations states that 32% of road accidents (in America) are listed in the category where injured were rescuers those rushed to save lives of others but put themselves in dangers. Here we cannot put our head in the sand and have to educate ourselves and made our students more and more conscious during training sessions about the priorities; rescuers safety is first priority.

Let me share one example with you where one road side accident (secondary accident) occurred, when an ambulance hit one pedestrian in LACHI; a small town; nearby Kohat city. An incident occurred at remote site area where qualified doctor was deployed, who decided to evacuate the patient to CMH Kohat. On their way to hospital they ambulance hit a pedestrian, an old man, and now the doctor gave him first aid to take him in the same ambulance to CMH Kohat. Just imagine what could have gone wrong which caused driver to adopt unsafe behavior and he hit a pedestrian. In this case, they lost time, they were in anxiety and wasted time on road side with bystanders (who could not understand the whole situation and involved in firefighting with the driver and doctor and started inquiries about the victim in ambulance), how could they have managed the 2^nd patient in the ambulance (as generally in Pakistan ambulances can transport only one patient at one time), more stress after the secondary road side accident, medical expenses of second victim, communication expenses, local authorities inquiries, company wide road accident investigation and associated costs. You might recall the hidden cost of accidents iceberg to the above mentioned accident as well.

Generally in industry we only consider some of the cases very dangerous, for example; explosives environment, radioactive materials, toxic gases and other hazmats, and only have SOP in place to see if it is safe to enter the scene to rescue instead to have generalize approach.

“Accidents don’t have holidays”.

We should also have broader approach to cover all the misunderstandings those can harm you, if you missed your chance at first hand. And now when we have make sure the scene safety, we have to make sure we also have barriers against infectious body fluids and blood.

In the end, I just want to finish it that always use your common sense and never approach a scene that is not safe.

 

 

Thanks & Best Regards,

Faisal Javed Mir

A very warm welcome to all,

I am pretty sure that many of our respected members may know that American Heart Association and other association and oraganizations has launched guidelines for CPR, ECC and First Aid in October last year. But today I would like to share some details about the history of CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation).

In today’s post I would like to list a brief history of CPR invention. We are bringing the details to our forum (courtesy to AHA) to make it public for our group members.

In 1954, Dr. James Elam proved that expired air was sufficient to maintain adequate oxygenation. He worked hard on it throughout and after two years jointly with Dr. Peter Safar, they invented mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in 1956.

Both worked together and discovered the airway, head tilt and chin lift techniques as well along with the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

In 1957, Dr. Peter Safar combined the A (Airway) and the B (Breathing) of CPR with the C (chest compressions), and wrote the book ABC of Resuscitation, which established the basis for mass training of CPR.

In 1960, Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was developed. The American Heart Association (AHA) started a program to acquaint physicians with close-chest cardiac resuscitation and became the forerunner of CPR training for the general public.

In 1973, AHA promulgated standards for this A-B-C system for CPR training for public domain.

We hope the above may be of any help and information.

Thanks & Best Regards,
Faisal Javed Mir

Most of us learn safety from home. As our parents, friends and relatives direct us “this not be done, this should be done”. They only dictate but the thing is the one should understand the reasons and make understand the other. This is the area one which we should give stress to make a healthy community. We should be a role model for the followers. We should be able to explain and convince the other, why? And why not?. There will be many questions on the mind. For example, we say to our children don’t play with electricity. Child says “my father told me not to play with electricity”, so I am not playing.  This should not be the case. Father have the responsibility to make understand the child what happens if electrocuted, what are the safety systems are inbuilt, what social and environmental impact, how to save electricity and convince the child. So child never forgets these things and it act as a basic lifeline in the future.

What happens here, the busy father leave behind this responsibility because he has to fulfill a lot of other responsibilities and he is not able to find time to spare with children and family.  We should share our concern with the children also to the maximum possible extend. We should be able to convert our experiences into small stories and ask our children to evaluate it. Let them learn from it. There by we can keep on developing our children and a new generation. We should provide learn and develop environments instead of spoon feeding the data. Let us try to develop skills, observe safety attitude in our young generation which can act as a backbone for many achievements. A safety cautious personality can make win & win situation.

I wonder if their are many people  who work in our area that belive that it is not nessery to maintain the levels of first aid  training in an organisation every three year as is required.I belve its always important as treats change as more research is done. Once we were told head back for a nose bleed now the advise is head forward.Anyone rememeber other changes eg putting a spoon into the mouth of a person having a fit?

Robert Acheson
http://www.fad.ie

With the focus on Health & Safety (and in particular Working at Height) forever creeping up the average truck operator's risk assessment agenda `Biglorryblog` has been impressed by recent efforts being taken to stop a driver become a 'free fall guy'---especially off the back of a rigid. Having successfully developed its removable, easy-to-erect from ground-level tensioned post and wire system for Ainscough Crane Hire's STGO trailers, Tinsely Special Products has been indundated with calls from operators of smaller vehicles wanting a similar system. And this is what they've come up with. You can read all about it in the next 'Safety First' feature by yours truly in a forthcoming edition of Commercial Motor. In addition to being easy-to-assemble you can leave an opening for a forklift on either side of the load platform whilst still keeping the wires tensioned around the rest of the body.  It can be fitted to big rigids too and regular 2.5m wide trailers.
The Work at Height Regulations 2005 apply to everyone working at height where there is a risk of a fall liable to cause personal injury. The regulations place duties on “employers, the self-employed, and any person who controls the work of others (e.g. facilities managers or building owners who may contract others to work at height) to the extent they control the work”. Poor control may result in action from the HSE or local authorities. Fines of up to £20,000 can be imposed for breaches of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, with unlimited fines and possibly imprisonment if cases are heard in higher courts. Directors and managers can also face prosecution as individuals if their acts or omissions led to the offence. HSE and local authority inspectors will look closely at all work activities that cause most harm – so acting to control such risks will help you avoid falling foul of the law. The HSE also says: “Revocation of your operator’s licence is also a possibility when health and safety offences come to the attention of the Traffic Commissioner.”
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo5w4KbWH4E

I have been designing systems to manage incident information for 10 years now (you may have noticed those ads for CoreHSE.com - yeah, that's me!), and if there is one lesson I have learned, it is this: make sure you know what you know. Often times, when we are dealing with the very real and raw emotions of an accident our perceptions about what really happened becomes somewhat clouded. We are focused on getting the best possible treatment for our friend and co-worker, securing the area, making sure no one else gets hurt, and all the other immediate response activities that come as second nature to most of us.

However, if we are ever going to truly prevent this from happening again we need to do a proper and thorough investigation. And for most of us, this comes as second-nature as well. But, let me pull the camera back a bit, and let’s look at the landscape from a little further out. What if we want to optimize our analysis of critical incident management? What if we want to know the most dangerous machine in our building? What if a product engineer asks us, “What is the history of injuries for this part we manufacture?” What if we want to know the 5-year trend of upper extremity burns across our 20 oil platforms?

 

There is only one way to really know what you know and that is through codes. You should code as much as you can to enhance your incident management. There are many things we could code about an incident – injury type, body part, body location, lost time, medical treatment, machine, location, and on and on. However I suggest there is one code more important than all of those other items. This code will determine whether you “count” this incident. This code will set a precedent for long-term trend analysis. This code was the basis for our HS&E Management system we started 10 years ago. That code is : Most Serious Result.

The problem we were trying to solve was being able to compare the injury rates from  plant in Kentucky, USA to the rates from a plant in Plymouth, England. With such vastly different governments mandating completely different standards for injury reporting, it was not possible to harmonize the two systems based on government requirements. And that’s just those two countries. What about France, Germany, the Czech Republic, India, and the rest of our operations all over the world? How were we supposed to get everyone reporting similar critical incidents in a similar (or to be more precise – exact) manner? 

What we developed was a coding system for result that would be applied across all of our operations regardless of jurisdiction or government. It would be *our* reporting standard. This standard became the corner-stone for our corporate Incident Management system. No longer were we forced to parse the local laws of Wuhu, China to decide if an injury was reportable to the Chinese government and therefore should be counted.  

In the next article I will show you the codes we came up with and some of the challenges we had implementing this coding system.

The importance of having an up to date “Driving at Work Management System in place is getting crutial by the day as legislation dictates that we must protect our businesses from the few.

One of the biggest issues we face as human beings is our attitude to certain protocols in life, for instance how many times have we heard someone at work or within our business say;

“It’s not my job”        or       “It won’t happen to me”

It never ceases to amaze me at times that a large proportion of employees will pass the buck by assuming you are responsible when an incident happens. It is all too easy to lay the blame at somebody else’s doorstep and it could be yours if you are not careful, it’s called human conditioning. 

Health & Safety isn’t a sexy subject, and before you doze off, as it always happens when we talk about Health & Safety especially compounded with vehicles being a very emotive subject then I am onto a loser before I start!

We need to take a hard look at the management systems that we have in place, because, as the legislation gets tighter and resultant fines from breaches being like telephone numbers. Can we afford not to take action and be responsible 100% of the time whether that is from an employer, employee, sub contractor or volunteer perspective?

So how do you protect everyone in your business? The answer is easy; communicate with everyone in a manner that gets the message across, without alienating them or yourself into the bargain.

It is funny; when we use the word “communicate” we tend to clam up and are not sure where to start.

Get a pad and pen out and let me ask you; when someone whom you employ or engage to do work for you, drives on behalf of your organisation.  Do you see or think of areas that can eat into your profit? If so write them down and address it.

For instance a van livered up with your name pristine and proudly displayed and the driver is either doing something or a number of things all at the same time. Such as using a mobile phone, smoking, speeding, hand gestures or even parked irresponsibly. You may even class these as minor issues. But they can dent your reputation without you knowing about it until it is too late. Would you purchase food from a baker when the driver delivering the goods has been seen smoking in the cab?  or would you recommend a plumber, joiner or an electrician if they cut you up and started giving gestures out the window?, I know I wouldn’t and perhaps now I have maybe started you thinking.

No matter what business you are in and are using vehicles, you run the risk of lost sales revenue by the actions of a few. Now we all need sales to keep the business going it is our life blood.

Take speeding & mobile phone issues and a minimum 3 points on the drivers licence as a result, what will this do to your insurance renewal? The driver has a risk of losing their licence with totting up of points? What is your policy for reporting this?

With businesses going through difficult times, can you really afford to eat into what profit you may have?

Now let’s look at the worst case scenario and the driver has caused or is involved in an incident. If a fatality has occurred the police will treat it the same way as a murder and you better hope that you have a fully auditable management system in place to protect you which will stand up to close scrutiny.  

Examples above will have a cost; however fines for serious breaches could put you out of business unless you have money stashed under the mattress so to speak and you don’t need to own the vehicle.

What will the cost be if you have to replace an employee who was injured, died or even sent to prison because of the incident. Now I hear you say the dreaded words “That won’t happen to us” It could, how do you know as it only takes a lapse of concentration. Oh, and what about all the adverse publicity, fine and the time it drags out as it could be a few years before it is heard in court if you are deemed negligent.

Putting your house in order isn’t rocket science and you have three choices.

1.      Engage a company to help you install a proper management system.

This will allow you to get your house in order correctly using the expertise available.

 

2.      Do it yourself or have someone in your organisation do it.

Understanding what is required may eat into more resources than you realise and the person needs to be competent and have an understanding of what is required.

 

3.      Continue as you are.

This isn’t an option, if you have something in place get it reviewed, otherwise you may well be in a false position. If you are not sure what you have in place get it checked out now as it could be the best decision you have made.

These options have cost implications; the most expensive will only come to light when you have an incident. The big question is can you afford to take the chance? Safety isn’t a cost option, it is a necessary option as the:

“Unexpected will always happen when you least expect it too!”