The National Safety Council recently announced OSHA's top 10 violations for the fiscal year of 2015. These highlight how tracking data plays a critical role in both encouraging compliance and improving workplace safety. "In injury prevention, we go where the data tell us to go," said Deborah A.P. Hersman, National Safety Council President and CEO, in a news release. "The OSHA top 10 list is a roadmap that identifies the hazards you want to avoid on the journey to safety excellence."
The top 10 violations for the fiscal year 2015 are:
- Fall Protection–6,721
- Hazard Communication–5,192
- Scaffolding–4,295
- Respiratory Protection–3,305
- Lockout/Tagout–3,002
- Powered Industrial Trucks–2,760
- Ladders–2,489
- Electrical-Wiring Methods–2,404
- Machine Guarding–2,295
- Electrical-General Requirements–1,973
Pre-loss safety inspections and compliance audits are some of the most effective ways to reduce your chances of falling prey to one of these violations or a host of other hazards. However, all the inspections and audits in the world won't make a difference if inspection observations are lost in a paper or email trail.
An RMIS platform with the ability to host electronic safety inspection questionnaires or checklists can streamline how field users collect information on common hazards and how they recommend loss control. For example, when a field user flags any one of these OSHA violations in an electronic checklist, the system could automatically recommend corrective actions and then instantly assign tasks to individual(s) responsible for those corrective actions.
Further, once solutions are put in place, you can monitor their effectiveness with automated tracking and reports. More specifically, if you institute a new process around ladder safety at one of your locations, you can compare incidents involving ladders at that location versus others where the new process has not been implemented. You could also measure whether a location’s ladder incidents are trending downward over time, after putting the corrective action in place.
Having these advanced analytics at your fingertips allows for increased visibility into your loss control activities, as well as more efficiency when compiling and monitoring safety metrics. As a result, you might be better positioned to prevent accidents and increase safety, while also avoiding becoming another OSHA statistic — learn more by contacting us.