Safety Tidbit 4.11 – Prevention through Design
Reference: NIOSH PtD – Prevention through Design
Wouldn’t it be great if safety hazards could be eliminated during the design phase of a building? As an industrial hygiene consultant, I am always looking for ways to engineer out hazards at existing facilities. Often, I tour a facility right after it was completed. The owner, proactively, invites me in just before production was scheduled to get started to walk around and have a look. Unfortunately, everything is in place and making changes now is very difficult and costly. I usually commend them for thinking about their workers’ health and safety and then say if I had been brought in a just little bit earlier, I could have reviewed the construction plans and possibly (most likely) saved them energy (time and money) by assisting with the anticipation part of industrial hygiene and making recommendations for controls of the hazards.
This week, I was at the PA Governor’s Occupational Safety and Health Conference in Hershey. It was a great time, and hopefully, a few of our students can attend next year. Dr. Michael Toole, now at the University of Toledo as Dean for the School of Engineering presented on Prevention through Design or PtD. I knew Mike when he was a professor at Bucknell University where a few years ago we invited him to speak on the same topic at our much smaller conference at the Nittany Lion Inn. The Central PA Safety Association, along with the local sections of ASSE, and AIHA host a health and safety conference every spring. Dr. Toole described what PtD was and how it can save time and money (and lives) through the life of the structure. I was curious how this might work into my research on how to get employers to review their airborne hazards and minimize worker exposures without the use of personal protective equipment – namely respiratory protection. You see, I too was presenting at the conference on how employers assess your workplace for silica hazards and complete the Exposure Control Plan as required by the OSHA Respirable Crystalline Silica standard.
NIOSH has a national initiative “to prevent or reduce occupational injuries, illnesses, and fatalities through the inclusion of prevention considerations in all designs that impact workers.” Most of the examples that Dr. Toole used in his presentation involved ergonomic issues and incorporating anchorages into the design of the structure so that building the facility was safer and future maintenance workers had the means to connect their fall arrest systems.
During Professor Toole’s presentation, my thoughts ran to how we design the facility anticipating the airborne hazards and therefore protecting the workers before they ever set foot on the job? I don’t want the workers to have to use personal protective equipment which can be cumbersome and oftentimes, ineffective. Actually, the better question is how can I affect the decision-making process, so the employer uses their agency to protect their workers by taking charge of the hazard right from the start instead of relying on the workers’ proper use of personal protective equipment (again namely respirators)?
Hope this was helpful and thank you for reading my Safety Tidbits! Comments and questions are always welcome. ~ Bryan
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