Fatigue at work is a significant contributor to occupational injuries and illnesses. It’s also the point of special emphasis in the third week of the National Safety Council’s National Safety Month 2019 (#NSM).

As a result, we’re going to take a special look at issues related to fatigue on the job in this article in the hopes of providing some information that may help avoid some injuries and illnesses (and maybe even a fatality).

If you’ve been keeping track, you also know we’ve already written about hazard recognition and slips, trips, and falls for national safety month. You might also want to check out what our friends at RedVector have been writing on for National Safety Month. Next week we’ll both be addressing impairment issues.

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Hazard recognition is one of the most critical aspects of occupational safety. In fact, OSHA says that “One of the ‘root causes’ of workplace injuries, illnesses, and incidents is the failure to identify or recognize hazards that are present, or that could have been anticipated.”

The idea that hazard identification/recognition is important to safety is a common one. And following from this, you’ll often see people within the safety industry saying it’s important to train workers on how to identify hazards at work. But what you don’t see quite as often as those first two is any guidance on how to effectively train workers to identify hazards at their workplace. That’s what we’re hoping to help you with a little bit in this article.

By the way, this article was written to parallel the National Safety Council’s National Safety Month (June, 2019) and its first-week emphasis on hazard recognition training. You can learn more about National Safety Month and even download some materials related to hazard recognition from the NSC here.

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Every field has its sets of established truths. But if you consider some of these so-called “truths” a little critically, you sometime find out they’re not true at all. It’s like the professional version of an urban myth. They’re in the air around us; we read about them and we heard smart people saying they’re true; we never stop to question if they really ARE true; and ultimately, we end up believing in them ourselves.

In the learning and development field, a classic myth is that you can get better training results by designing training to match your learner’s so-called learning styles. But I digress–we’ll get back to that in another article.

In occupational safety, there may be some myths out there too. And that’s why we had the conversation below with “safety mythologist” Carsten Busch. Put on your critical-thinking cap and your skeptical socks and give it a listen (or a read). And many thanks to Carsten for his sharing his time and knowledge with us.

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Risk management can be a powerful tool in occupational safety and health. And when applied strategically, it can help safety managers avoid serious injuries and most importantly fatalities at work.

That’s good to know, because as our risk management/safety management expert Pam Walaski explains in the interview below, the rates of occupational fatalities haven’t been going down as of late and we can do better.

In the interview below, Pam (who’s also done interviews with us on Risk Management and Safety Management Systems as well as Five Steps to Implementing Risk-Based Safety Approaches) explains the current and sad reality of occupational fatalities, explains why risk management is a tool we can use to combat these fatalities, and shows us how to get started.

As always, thanks to Pam.

Also, know we’ve included a free starter’s guide to using risk-based occupational safety management at the very bottom of this article. 

You can watch/listen to the discussion in the video below or click MORE to read a transcript (the guide’s down there, too).

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OSHA’s regulations cover employers in the 50 states plus a number of territories and jurisdictions (this includes but is not limited to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico).

Many of those states or territories are covered by what’s known as federal OSHA. However, 22-27 states and/or territories have OSHA-approved state plans instead of being covered by federal OSHA. We’ve given a range because it depends on how you count them, something we’ll explain more for you below.

We’ll explain the state OSHA plans a little more in this article, which is a continuation of our OSHA Basics series of articles.

Also, a quick head’s up–we’ve included a free downloadable guide to OSHA inspections for you at the bottom of this article.

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