June 2011 Safety Message

Making Safety a HABIT

Everything around us at work and at home has the potential to contribute to an incident that could cause harm. People often get hurt because they don’t make the conscious choices about how not to get hurt. By making safety a habit in our daily routine at work and at home allows us to make those right choices and avoid or reduce the risk of incident or injury.

The first step in making safety a habit includes asking ourselves what has the potential to cause an incident. How will I stay safe despite any potential risks that may be present? Habit starts off by recognizing the hazards that may be present in the work I am about to perform. Too often we find out after an incident that a person was unaware that a hazard existed and training and coaching our people to recognize hazards in the workplace is a responsibility we must all share.

The next step involves an assessment of the hazards and what is the likelihood that any one of these hazards identified could contribute to an incident. This risk assessment must be driven by the task and not the people doing the task. Consider all the steps in the task to be performed and don’t allow your natural risk tolerance cause you or anyone else to under estimate the hazard that may exist. It is very important that we consider complacency when we carry out this assessment for those tasks that we repeat many times. All it takes is one small change and conditions are never the same even if we have performed the same task many times before. Too often we see reoccurring type injuries that may be a result of complacent behaviour that contributed to the incident.

After assessing the hazards and there is still some doubt or uncertainty then we must stop at this point and get help to control any risk that may still be present with the potential to cause an incident or harm. Too often our risk tolerance makes us accept the hazard present thinking there is no likelihood it can happen to me. Our safety and the safety of others around us must be above all other values and if we cannot do it safely, then we just don’t do it.

Make safety a habit and before starting any task, consciously and purposefully assess all the hazards and decide on how we are not going to get hurt today.