A representative from Cumming Consulting attended the annual Alberta Health and Safety Conference last week in Calgary. The conference is a two-fold event, combining educational sessions, and a trade fair. This year’s theme was 10 YEARS AND BUILDING, where they emphasized that “building on the previous successes in industry, new technologies, economic factors, the changing face of the workforce and changes to the environment create new health and safety challenges. Employers must continuously be striving to meet and overcome these new challenges and ensure that workers have a safe and healthy workplace now and in the future.”
The conference was a great experience and it is inspiring to see that not only so much time, effort, and money is being invested into the health and safety industry but to see that so many employers are devoted to providing safe workplaces for their employees.
At the conference many of the courses taken by our representative focused on preventative measures to avoid accidents- ergonomics, watching threshold limit values, using social media to update safety issues, how to relieve stress, avoiding fatigue, building effective health and safety plans, and so on. Few classes dealt with the reactive side of the injury being what happens after an individual is injured. There were a few panels and discussions on how organizations and policies were affected post severe workplace injuries and how they changed their health and safety plans to avoid incidents in the future. They discussed how something big must happen to procure change in legislation and even then this is not always true. But let’s face it accidents do still inevitably happen no matter how many safety measures are put into place and I think that there should be more attention placed on this fact and how we can help injured workers where the damage was already done- the reactive side of an injury.
Health and safety is a huge focus this day and age but what happens to the workers who these measures we take fail or fall short? This must be hand in hand with health and safety and the discussions revolving around the issue of improving the workplace for workers. The workers must also know that there is appropriate recourse for when legitimate accidents do happen- not that they will get their wrist slapped for ruining perfect safety records. WCB speaks of the decrease in claims but we want to make sure that they aren’t just focused on the preventative and how to lower claim numbers but think too of how best to handle the injuries that do happen- not just get them out of the system so their safety statistics look admirable. Furthermore, it must be ensured that employers are actually building safe workplaces and not just avoiding filing claims so their reputations along with their rates and premiums stay acceptable. A number of individuals I talked with expressed this as a common problem in the workforce still. They didn’t even want to discuss WCB and when they did they almost seemed mad at workers because their accidents and claims caused their safety numbers and WCB rates to be altered. The system of basing rates on accidents is good in theory but flawed for this main reason that it causes manipulation, and ignorance of claims sometimes.
The conference was educational and it was definitely refreshing to see the focus and continuous improvements being made in the health and safety industry. Cumming Consulting will be attending such conferences in the future so that we too can stay abreast with the health and safety industry that consequently affects our clients as well.
The conference was a great experience and it is inspiring to see that not only so much time, effort, and money is being invested into the health and safety industry but to see that so many employers are devoted to providing safe workplaces for their employees.
At the conference many of the courses taken by our representative focused on preventative measures to avoid accidents- ergonomics, watching threshold limit values, using social media to update safety issues, how to relieve stress, avoiding fatigue, building effective health and safety plans, and so on. Few classes dealt with the reactive side of the injury being what happens after an individual is injured. There were a few panels and discussions on how organizations and policies were affected post severe workplace injuries and how they changed their health and safety plans to avoid incidents in the future. They discussed how something big must happen to procure change in legislation and even then this is not always true. But let’s face it accidents do still inevitably happen no matter how many safety measures are put into place and I think that there should be more attention placed on this fact and how we can help injured workers where the damage was already done- the reactive side of an injury.
Health and safety is a huge focus this day and age but what happens to the workers who these measures we take fail or fall short? This must be hand in hand with health and safety and the discussions revolving around the issue of improving the workplace for workers. The workers must also know that there is appropriate recourse for when legitimate accidents do happen- not that they will get their wrist slapped for ruining perfect safety records. WCB speaks of the decrease in claims but we want to make sure that they aren’t just focused on the preventative and how to lower claim numbers but think too of how best to handle the injuries that do happen- not just get them out of the system so their safety statistics look admirable. Furthermore, it must be ensured that employers are actually building safe workplaces and not just avoiding filing claims so their reputations along with their rates and premiums stay acceptable. A number of individuals I talked with expressed this as a common problem in the workforce still. They didn’t even want to discuss WCB and when they did they almost seemed mad at workers because their accidents and claims caused their safety numbers and WCB rates to be altered. The system of basing rates on accidents is good in theory but flawed for this main reason that it causes manipulation, and ignorance of claims sometimes.
The conference was educational and it was definitely refreshing to see the focus and continuous improvements being made in the health and safety industry. Cumming Consulting will be attending such conferences in the future so that we too can stay abreast with the health and safety industry that consequently affects our clients as well.
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