What do you do with employees who have a history of injuries? Fire them and they may sue, but leave them on the job and they might harm themselves or others.

Now there’s a way for legally removing these people from the workplace.

Some companies conduct fitness for duty (FFD) evaluations in these situations. They’re similar to post-offer, pre-hire physical exams to determine ability to do the job. But FFDs can be done any time during employment and are broader: They determine physical, mental and emotional fitness.

A comprehensive FFD program would include:

• pre-placement medical evaluations, often done with safety-sensitive jobs
• absence management, including people who call in sick Mondays and Fridays and presenteeism, people not fully productive under stress from family issues or medication
• for-cause drug and alcohol testing, based on credible report of impairment, and
• pre-assignment clearance to new tasks or after leave due to injury or FMLA.

An FFD would withstand legal challenges if a company:

• administers it fairly across the board
• makes tests reasonable and job-related
• doesn’t make decisions on past health records, such as cancer history
• keeps test results confidential, and
• gives a disqualified employee the right to submit his or her own evidence as to fitness for duty.

For more information on FFD evaluations, click here.

Does your company use FFD evaluations? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

Michael Coleman, Manufacturing Specialty Administrator for the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) says the company he works for knows that by not cutting safety and health programs during the economic downturn, U.S. companies are holding onto and gaining in market share worldwide.

“However, those that reduce their safety and health budgets and programs are looking at losing that competitive edge,” Coleman said.

Coleman will discuss how safety programs help manufacturers stay competitive at this year’s ASSE Professional Development Conference and Expo, June 28-July 1 in San Antonio, TX.

Check in with SafetyNewsAlert.com next week for stories from the conference.

Other key presenters include acting OSHA administrator Jordan Barab and U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that OSHA’s internal controls aren’t sufficient to ensure that only qualified worksites participate in VPP.

From January 2003 to August 2008, 30 VPP sites had fatalities. The GAO found that some sites had safety and health violations related to the fatalities and remained in the VPP despite no longer meeting the definition of an exemplary workplace.

OSHA’s response to the GAO report came swiftly. It said it’s committed to fixing any problems with the program.

But the headline OSHA put on its own press release tells the real story: “OSHA begins evaluation of Voluntary Protection Program.”

The release goes on to say that OSHA’s evaluation will “determine how the agency should best allocate its resources among cooperative programs, enforcement and the agency’s other activities.”

VPP and its related Alliance Program will go under the microscope “to determine their effectiveness as well as review the programs’ roles in helping the agency promote the safety and health of America’s workers.”

Acting OSHA administrator Jordan Barab noted that the agency hadn’t acted on a 2004 GAO report that suggested an evaluation of VPP’s effectiveness.

The Obama administration has made no secret of wanting to increase OSHA enforcement. It’s already allocated more funding to do that. One more way the administration could devote more money to enforcement: Reallocate money from cooperative programs such as VPP to inspections.

You can download the GAO’s report here.

Contributed by Christopher Nguyen, Director of Risk Management, The Peninsula, New York, NY.

Our safety committee had representation from all the different departments in our company.

They were committed to being on the committee and to workplace safety overall.

But all the committee members were department managers.

They knew a lot about safety but weren’t necessarily involved in the day-to-day situations that we wanted to address to reduce injuries.

To get a sense of safety issues employees faced regularly, we wanted to make sure the right employees got onto the safety committee.

Key: Who chooses members

The best way to make sure employees’ safety concerns were addressed by our committee was to let them choose their own representatives.

As it turned out, employees made good choices for safety committee members. They chose co-workers who had influence within their departments.

Other employees bring concerns or ideas to them, and the representatives bring those to our safety committee.

To emphasize their importance, I have a brief chat with the members as I do my daily walk-through.

Bringing non-management employees chosen by their peers onto the safety committee has had a direct impact. The number of injuries has gone down, and those are numbers that I can take to our workers’ comp insurer to keep our rates in check.

Contributed by Tom Hess, Safety Manager, Toll Packaging Group, Gibson City, IL.

Our safety program required that we have first responders. That wasn’t a problem in itself — I’d never have any lack of people who wanted to be first responders.

But here was the question: If employees never had any experience with emergency rescue, how would I know the volunteers would react properly in a real emergency?

I got the answer to my question by inviting some guest speakers to our monthly plant-wide safety meetings.

Over the years, I’ve used all sorts of experts who are here, right in our community, to provide expert lessons during our safety meetings.

They included representatives from our fire extinguisher provider and our workers’ comp insurance carrier.

So to address the employees who thought they wanted to be our first responders, I asked some paramedics from the local ambulance service to come in and speak.

They face the types of emergencies on a regular basis that our first responders would be called upon for.

Bringing in someone who faced emergencies on a daily basis created a new awareness for my volunteers.

After hearing from the paramedics, some employees decided maybe they weren’t the best candidates for the job because they couldn’t imagine doing some of the things the paramedics had to do.

After I brought in the guest speakers, I had my answer. I knew our first responders had a better idea of the types of situations they might encounter.

As a result, our company realized one more benefit from inviting outside speakers to our safety meetings.

Ever need to show upper management that safety saves money? One employer recently quantified the savings realized after putting more emphasis on workplace safety.

Bradley County, TN, says it recently saved more than $125,000 in 2008 compared to 2007 because of its upgraded safety inspections. It’s a 47% drop in workers’ comp expenses, according to a report in The Chattanoogan.

The County Safety Department said it had a 23% decrease in workers’ comp claims.

The county attributes the savings to stepped up safety training, employee awareness and quarterly safety classes for all employees.

The safety director also inspected all 33 county buildings at least once during the year for hazards that could result in an injury.

The county says it’s been more thorough than the state OSHA inspections would be.

OSHA has resources available online to help businesses quantify how much safety saves.

How do you show that safety saves money for your business? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

His story:

No doubt in our minds: Reporting and investigating near-misses were both key elements to controlling risks before employees were injured.

However, near-miss reports at our company were few and far between.

So we started a program to increase near-miss reporting.

Educate, count, reward

We told all employees everyone was expected to report unsafe acts, conditions or situations.

One barrier: Some employees were afraid to speak up about safety problems. Often, this fear came from work at other companies where near-miss reporting was criticized or ignored.

So we held a class to show employees how to speak up when they observed unsafe behavior. This training included powerful stories from experienced people explaining that not speaking up often results in serious injury or even death to themselves or others.

After everyone learned how to speak up, we started tracking the number of near-miss reports turned in. As they say, what gets measured gets done.

The final part: We set up a rewards program. Nothing fancy; crews with the most near-miss reports got to leave work a little early, use the parking close to the gate, and eat lunch on the company.

Workers turned in 3,000 near-miss reports in a year. And our OSHA recordable rate went down to just 0.7.

(Adapted from a presentation by Doug Nugent, Safety Manager, Shaw Group, Lena, LA, at ASSE’s Safety 2008 conference)

Her story:

Per calendar year, strains, sprains, pain or spasms made up 40% of our injury reports. 

But out of those reported, only a small number were investigated to find root causes. 

Staff didn’t investigate them because they thought the incidents didn’t offer much opportunity for identifying meaningful root causes. 

But I was convinced that wasn’t the case. Meaningful investigations could lead to practical recommendations to control or abate hazards and risks. 

A key to meaningful investigations was to ask better questions of the people involved. 

It’s all in the question 

A poorly phrased question can lead an employee – and an investigation – down the wrong path. Examples: 

Misleading: Why did this accident happen? (Questions translates to the worker as, who’s to blame?) 

Better: What led to your pain or injury? 

Misleading: Have you had this pain before? (Workers tend to give answers that point only to work.) 

Better: What situations set off your pain? (Interviewer can follow up with, “Does it happen off work, too?) 

After supervisors used better questioning techniques, we were better able to identify real root causes of incidents that either caused or had the potential to cause injuries. 

We were able to take corrective action and lower our injury rate. 

(Adapted from a presentation by Gail House, Safety & Health Manager, Walt Disney World Resort, Orlando, FL, at ASSE’s Safety 2008 conference)

Airports are using dogs to shoo birds — a real safety hazard for planes — off airfields.

This is serious business, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Birds can disable wing tips, dent fuselage, obstruct motors and break windshields. The FAA says, between 1990 and 2007:

• more than 82,000 aircraft-animal collisions were reported, with 97% involving birds
• eight wildlife strikes caused 11 human deaths after collisions with planes caused pilots to lose control of their aircraft, and
• losses from bird strikes alone totaled $291 million and 362,000 hours in aircraft down time.

How does the dog program work? Herding breeds, such as border collies, are trained to shoo birds from airfields, according to an article in USA Today.

Birds think the dogs are predators, such as wolves or coyotes.

The dogs aren’t cheap to hire. One trained dog and handler from a private service can cost up to $100,000 a year.

These dogs and their trainers are also providing similar services to other companies.

Right here at SafetyNewsAlert headquarters, we’ve had the opportunity to watch a dog and its handler shoo Canada geese from the retention ponds in the corporate park.

It’s quite something to watch: The birds take off as a flock and fly far away after being chased by the dog.

The safety and health ramifications here are less serious than at airports: No one wants to track the birds’ droppings into the workplace.

And the birds are aggressive while they’re nesting in the spring. Pairs tend to return to the same spots year after year, and one couple has been nesting on top of a concrete retention wall in our parking lot. When the geese think their nest is threatened, they do “attack” innocent employees trying to get to their cars, with wings flapping, beaks snapping.

If you’re looking to get rid of nuisance birds using dogs, there’s one thing you should know: You need to bring the dogs back time and time again. If you don’t, the birds will just return.

Do you have nuisance birds at your facility? What problems do they cause? Have you done anything to get rid of them? Let us know in the Comments Box below.