Page 38 - Occupational Health & Safety, August 2018

HAND PROTECTION
Seven Ways to Improve Hand Injury Data
The real work of analyzing hand injury trends begins with the physical improve- ment of the organization’s hand safety program after the data has been scrubbed.
BY JENNIFER CHOI
without direction. To make a real impact, we need to start our revisions before we select PPE.
Reactive and Predictive Data Tracking
Data mining and incident data tracking through algo- rithms have become increasingly popular. New pre- dictive analysis software is more than just flashy. There are hundreds of software companies that are keen to get your organization on board with new formulas to boost your organization’s productivity and profitabil- ity. Some of these delve into the world of safety and make big promises on reducing recordable injuries by looking for trends or patterns in the incident data. An increasing number of safety professionals use the predictive data to identify activities or times of high incidence or severity and proactively reduce the haz- ards through engineering controls. Used correctly, it can provide safety managers with a bird’s eye view of their organization’s key performance indicators, but the output is only as good as the input.
1. Reduce and Define Verbs
Despite defined processes in place on timely report- ing of accidents and near misses, most incident re- ports are missing a lot of information. Many are a fill-in-the-blank style, making trend analysis virtually impossible. While it is important to collect qualita- tive, subjective information, it can make it difficult to get a cumulative view of the data to drive the need for corrective or preventative actions. For example, impact injuries are often listed as crush injuries, but they also can be listed as pinch, impact, or caught be- tween. These are often mixed in with other verbs such as crush, smash, mash, and bash. Reports heavy in undefined terms have effectively scrambled effective data trend analysis. Another commonly misappro- priated incident series surrounds sprain, strain, and repetitive stress. Following Balfour Beatty’s landmark £500,000 fine for negligence in minimizing vibration exposure, more organizations are re-examining their prior incidents to gauge their potential risk. Because the exposure time covered nine years, the look back through fragmented data may not reveal as much as it should (Price, 2018). Benchmark organizations are creating and refining definitions for incidents and making diagrams to record areas injured, and also adding subcategories to drill down root causes further than the output injury.
2. Define Min-Max Measurements
Min-Max definitions of simple injuries can go a long
CESTUSLINE, INC.
Improving hand safety goes beyond shopping for flashy, new PPE and grinding up pages of retro- active statistics. Hand injuries impact companies beyond their profit margin. They take a toll on
employee engagement and satisfaction, directly im- pacting productivity. Indirect costs, such as increased costs in insurance, medical bills, recruitment, train- ing, and administrative time, add up quickly, some- times adding another 20 percent onto the direct in- jury costs (Reid, 2015).
Before You Attack Technology
A combination of proactive process improvement measures and additional external regulatory forces have forced organizations to explore new technology and develop defined quality practices. With all the technological improvements now available, it is jar- ring to realize that many safety gloves have stagnated in design. Gloves on many sites today are cut from the same mold as your grandfather’s gloves he wore to work. PPE worn on site is the last line of defense be- tween employees and the hazards they face, but safety managers often leap past critical steps in their revision of hand safety policies for quick fixes. All too often, hand safety is reactive, post incident, or proactive,
34 Occupational Health & Safety | AUGUST 2018
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