In this article, we’ve pulled together a series of forklift safety tips for forklift operators. Putting these forklift safety tips into action should help your company reduce risks associated with forklift operation.

As you’ll see, some of the most important things you can do are to ensure that all employees receive proper forklift safety training, make sure all forklift are in proper operating condition through regular inspections and maintenance, and perform workplace hazard assessments to ensure a workplace that reduces forklift-associated hazards.

To help with this, we’ve included some helpful checklists at the bottom for performing forklift inspections and recording fuel use/battery charging on forklifts.

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Management review of an OHSMS, or Occupational Health and Safety Management System, is an important aspect of safety management. In this article, we’ll give you tips for performing management reviews on a timely and recurrent basis and in an effective manner.

This article is the last of a multi-article series on the issue of safety and health management in general and on the issue of the safety and health management guidelines in ANSI/ASSE Z10, the national standard for occupational health and safety management systems, in particular. The focus of this article is to provide an overview of Z10’s section 7.

For those interested in reviewing the articles in the series, here’s a list and the links:

• An introduction to various health and safety management system standards and guidelines
• A comparison of “systems” and “programs” approaches for health and safety management
• A look at management leadership and employee participation (an overview of Z10 section 3)
• How to plan your OHSMS (an overview of Z10 section 4)
• How to implement and operate your OHSMS (an overview of Z10 section 5)
• How to monitor, evaluate, and correct your OHSMS (an overview of Z10 section 6)

You might also want to know that OSHA recently released their own Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs. We recommend you check that out or read our overview of OSHA’s Safety and Health Programs Guideline (2016). And of course, we’ve all learned that 45001 is now final and will be released soon, so watch for that as well.

For those of you interested in reading about management review of an OHSMS, the article below awaits you.

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How would your company do during an OSHA fire extinguisher inspection? Or, more to the point, if an OSHA inspector were inspecting your workplace, would your fire extinguishers pass muster with the inspector?

We’re going to give you the information you need to pass that fire extinguisher inspection (Ha!!!–no pun intended on “PASS”).

And more importantly, the information you’ll need to know to make sure your fire extinguishers are ready to save property and lives in case of a fire. ‘Cuz that’s what they’re there for anyway, right?

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Fall Prevention and Protection has been in news a lot lately. The safety news, at least.

Fall prevention always generates a lot of discussions because falls are the leading cause of deaths in construction. In 2015, for example, there were 350 fatal falls to a lower level out of 937 construction fatalities. And fatalities are actually increasing in the last few years, not decreasing.

In addition, OSHA just held (May 8-12) their National Safety Stand Down to Prevent Falls in Construction.

And of course, OSHA just recently created a new final rule to update the General Industry Walking-Working Surfaces and Fall Protection Standards. We wrote an earlier article discussing how to update fall prevention training in relation to this new OSHA final rule.

Plus, I just attended a full-day fall prevention training course offered by the Pacific Northwest OSHA Education Center (this is part of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health Department of Environmental Occupational & Health Safety). The class was led by the excellent instructor Harvey McGill, special “guest star” Craig Hamelund of Oregon OSHA, an all-star panel including David Douglas of Fred Shearer & Sons, Doug Pettyjohn of SAIF Homebuilders Group, and Travis Stone of Associated General Contractors (AGC), plus a good-sized audience of industry professionals looking to learn more about fall prevention/protection and how to keep workers safe.

The class was excellent, I learned a lot about fall prevention and protection, and I left inspired to try to do good work in the safety industry. Not a bad recommendation, huh?

The article below will cover some of what we learned.

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Hopefully, you’ll never be in a fire and so you’ll never need to know how to use a fire extinguisher.

But of course, fires DO happen. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, in a recent year there were nearly 1,300,000 fires in the US, and they caused nearly 3,300 deaths, 16,000 injuries, and nearly $12 billion in losses/damages.

So we should all hope we’re never involved in a fire, but we should also learn how to use a fire extinguisher just in case.

To help, we’ve put together this fire extinguisher guide, which presents the proper way to select and use a fire extinguisher, and also gives you some guidance about when you should use a fire extinguisher instead of simply getting to safety and when you should evacuate if the fire gets too big despite your efforts.

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We can all agree that it’s a good idea to have fire extinguishers at work (and the home, too). In fact, OSHA has rules about that (though, of course, with some exceptions).

But not all fire extinguishers are the same. There are different types.

Which leads us to the all-important question: If you ARE going to buy fire extinguishers, what type should you buy?

We’ll explain the different types of fire extinguishers in this article to you and give you the information you need to understand the different fire extinguisher types and select the right extinguishers for your workplace.

We’ll tell you what you need to know about fire extinguisher types and how to select the right ones for your workplace in this article, but you may also want to do some self study to learn what fire really is, how it works, and how it’s put out. Some people talk about this in terms of something call the fire triangle, and some refer to the fire tetrahedron. Read more about the fire triangle and fire tetrahedron here.

Before you begin, you may also be curious about how a fire extinguisher works. Here’s an explanation taken from a short sample of our Fire Extinguisher Safety online training course.

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While we most often associate workplace injuries with construction, drilling, mining, or manufacturing jobs, injuries can occur even if you spend most your workday sitting at a desk. Therefore, office safety training is vital to creating a safer workplace. A clutter-free office environment and first-aid training can go a long way in ensuring occupational safety at the office.

We’ll give you some tips for keeping safe in the article below.

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As you may know, OSHA recently finalized a rule to update their Walking-Working Surfaces standard and their Fall Protection standard. In particular, the new rule updates standards addressing slip, trip, and fall hazards in Subpart D and adds additional requirements for personal fall protection systems in Subpart I.

In this article, we’ll point out some of the major changes that affect fall prevention and protection training. We’ll look at other consequences of the changes in future articles as well. In doing so, we’ll demonstrate how we’ve changed our own online Fall Prevention and Protection course to match the new final rule.

In addition to all that, we’ll give you some additional useful information too, such as what the purpose of the new rule is, how employers will benefit from it, and information about effective dates.

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Wondering what the OSHA fire extinguisher training requirements are for employers? If so, then this is the article you’ve been waiting for.

We’ll tell you what employers have to give fire extinguisher training to employees, why, and what kind of fire extinguisher safety training, if any, they have to provide.

So if you’re ready to learn more about all things related to OSHA fire extinguisher training, read on.

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We’ve published another in a series of articles related to safety training in the May issue of Professional Safety, the official magazine of the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE).

Also, hot tip–we hear they’re changing their name to the American Society of Safety Professionals, or ASSP. There’s a new logo coming, too. More on that when we find out more.

The series of articles provides tips for better safety training, and takes as a starting point some key parts of the ASSE/ANSI Z490.1 standard on Effective Safety Training. In this particular article, we focused on how to develop learner-centric safety training. Which is a fancy way of saying how to develop safety training that focuses on the learning needs of the learner. Seems logical when you put it that way, no?

We encourage you to check out the ASSE, their Professional Safety magazine, and of course their ANSI Z490.1 standard for Effective Safety Training. Also, be aware that ANSI and ASSE are beginning the process of creating ANSI Z490.2, which will deal with online or “virtual” safety training. We’re on the committee to create that standard and you can read more about that here.

Finally, we’ve got some safety-training-related freebies for you. To learn more about developing learner-centric safety training, download our free Guide to Effective Safety Training at the bottom of this article. It’s based on Z490.1, by clicking the large download button at the bottom of this article.

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