Page 40 - Occupational Health & Safety, August 2018

HAND PROTECTION
dent reports allows the field team to com- municate the likelihood of recurrence of singular incidents. Not only can this shed light on the need for preventative actions, it can engage employees to take more initia- tive on recognizing and voicing concerns over known hazards in their domain. Here are some questions to add:
■ Has something like this happened before in this task/area? (Y/N) When was the last time it happened?
■ If nothing changes, is this incident likely to recur? (Y/N)
■ Rate the severity of the incident.
(Develop a defined scale of 1-5.)
6. Implementing to Win in Phases
People hate change, so successful imple- mentation must be carefully planned. Fine- tuning current reporting systems to have a limited number of add-ons is easier for teams to digest than a complete software and process overhaul. Breaking up data improvements into phases can reduce em- ployee frustration with these additional de- mands over the same timeline. After a few run-throughs, team members will be more efficient with gathering and documenting
this additional data. Developing a checklist can make it easier for the person doing re- port intake to clarify the information while it is still fresh in everyone’s mind. The divi- dends of fine-tuning data are impactful and measurable. Suddenly, the fancy programs out in the market will compute usable re- ports to identify trends and hand safety program gaps.
7. Tracking Success
Luckily, fine-tuning your incident report- ing process is relatively free of cost. It is one of the cheapest improvements an organiza- tion can make. The job isn’t done after the initial incident reporting process refine- ments. The real work of analyzing hand injury trends begins with the physical im- provement of the organization’s hand safety program after the data has been scrubbed. The refinements help teams know where to begin by identifying high-incidence sites, tasks, injury areas, and risk factors. From this output, safety teams can make the most impactful changes now, before another re- cordable occurs. Developing the system will not only reduce injury experience ra- tios, it has the potential to improve safety engagement overall.
Jennifer Choi is Vice President of Opera- tions at Cestusline, Inc. Cestusline’s Cestus- Safe program has been responsible for sav- ing Cestus clients millions and improving hand safety organization-wide. Developing threshold-raising gloves fit for battle on any work site is only half of the Cestus Mission. Get in touch with our hand safety profession- als to view hand incident templates you can put into action today.
REFERENCES
1. Card, A. J. (2016). The problem with ‘5 whys’. BMJ Quality & Safety, bmjqs-2016-005849. doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2016-005849
2. Price, D. (2018). Balfour Beatty fined £500k over hand-arm vibration exposure. Retrieved from: https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/
3. Reid, M. (2015). Get a grip on hand injury costs. Retrieved from https://www.ishn.com/ articles/101557-get-a-grip-on-hand-injury-costs
4. Verma, A., Khan, S. D., Maiti, J., & Krishna, O. B. (2014). Identifying patterns of safety related incidents in a steel plant using association rule mining of incident investigation reports. Safety Science, 70, 89-98. doi:10.1016/j. ssci.2014.05.007
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Circle 9 on card.