Road map to an excellent safety program. How do I get there? What's involved? How can I measure progress? Am I making a difference? And, do the Managers really care?
This is what I hope to demonstrate here today. How you can and will make a difference. And, not only will the managers care, but you will be sought after as a resource in a pro-active way to prevent safety problems and accidents.
Starting off with a little background, I was a nurse in intensive care for 10 years, working at Miami Heart Institute on Miami Beach and Kaiser is San Francisco. It was tough. All my patients, whether newborns or adults, were in critical condition. I loved what I did. I saved lives. But, in 1976 I was a burnout. I went into Occupational Health Nursing at Cordis Dow Corporation, a joint venture between Cordis Corp. and Dow Chemical. It was great. My clients were now vertical, not horizontal, and I could teach prevention, health and wellness. After 2 years in the Health Office my boss came to me and said, "Pat, how would you like to be the safety supervisor"? I said, "I don't know anything about safety." He said, "you will." He sent me to the OSHA Institute in Chicago for one week and to a safety seminar hosted by Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan for a week. Now I wore two hats as the supervisor of safety & health. It was at Dow that I learned the backbone of safety management. I constantly heard from the top level managers and vice presidents, that 'all accidents can be prevented' and that 'safety is the front-line supervisors' responsibility'. Wanting to grow in the safety profession, and hoping never to return to hospital nursing, I read and studied, attended seminars, joined the National Safety Management Society and the American Society of Safety Engineers, and began a safety and health certification program at Florida International University, all in 1981.
At Cordis Dow we had an active management safety team where the site GM was the Chair. At those meetings we updated the site safety manual and reviewed accidents. When there was a lost time accident the case was reviewed with the Vice President of Operations, along with the injured employee, his supervisor and manager, all for the purpose of preventing a re-occurrence. The safety supervisor attended the monthly operations reviews. Safety was first up, before quality, presenting the site safety performance. Dow's commitment to safety was so ingrained and part of the way business was conducted that in the performance appraisals of managers, their overall rating could not be higher than the rating they got in safety.
