HEALTH & PRODUCTIVITY MANAGEMENT

Health Cost at workplace is usually considered as EXPENSES rather than as INVESTMENT. ACOEM -American Congress of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, introduced what they called HPM - Health and Productivity Management at the workplace. HPM try to change this belief of workers health as a Cost/Expenses to workers health cost as the Investment.
In his blog, Health politics, Dr Mike Magee has a videoblog on HPM entiteled Rethinking Health at workplace, go here to watch the video:
http://www.healthpolitics.org/archives.asp?previous=healthy_work_environment

Healthy workforce is the asset..... MODAL INSAN a term coined by our Prime Minister DS Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. Because Healthy workforce is a productive workforce.

Health Talk to SHELL Driver

This morning, I gave a health talk on "The Management of Fatigue" to SHELL drivers employed by Pengangkutan Mekar Tiasa (PMT) at Pending. An hour talk was planned 2 month ago by the Human Resource Unit of PMT. Around 15 people mainly drivers attended the talk. I have covered 6 scopes of fatigue in this talk:
1. What is fatigue and its spectrum?
2. How common is fatigue?
3. What is the cause of fatigue?
4. What is the effect of fatigue?
5. Who is at risk?
6. What is the treatment?
I am very happy with the response from the drivers; 6 of them participated actively in asking questions.
I have reminded them, fatigue can affect their performance as the driver. Study showed that Working for more than 20 hours is equivalent to the effect of Blood Alcohol Level of 0.1g/100cc. This is above the legal alcohol allowed by the law which is less than 0.08g/100cc.

UNSAFE CONDITION

CONTRIBUTING FACTORS OF INJURY / ILLNESS

Injury is a sequence of events. If all the factors contributing to injury synergise each other or exist simultaneously, then the injury will occur. The injury can be in the form of accident or near-hit (near-missed) incident.
There are two important contributing factors namely UNSAFE ACT and UNSAFE condition. UNSAFE ACT is the act of human that can cause injury such as driving and using handphone at the same time. It can be classified as the person factors. Why that person doing that Unsafe Act? It depends on a lot of factors such as knowledge, skill,attitude and behaviour. UNSAFE conditions on the other hand, are any pre-existence condition which can jeopardise the safety and health such as damage road, smooth floor etc. UNSAFE conditions usually classified as Environmental factors.

RISK ASSEESMENT IN OSH

Risk Assessment in Occupational Safety and Health is about identifying the hazards and determine our exposure and consequence to that hazard. Determine the exposure to the existence hazard is the first step in its risk assessment. What is your and other workers' exposure to the hazards : daily, weekly, monthly or occasionally. Then you consider what is the CONSEQUENCE of that hazard and what is its PROBABLITY. The CONSEQUENCE can be No injury, Minor injury, Moderate injury and Severe injury even Fatality. The probability of the consequence can be determined from the record or database of your workplace or other workplace, it is either probably, possibly, unlikely or rare.
Some Risk Registered System assigned the value to the Exposure level and Consequence to make it looks quantitative, therefore the RISK will be the product of: Exposure X Consequence.This quantitative value formed what we called Risk Matrix.
From the Risk Assessment we decide whether the RISK is acceptable or not. ALL RISK that result in FATALITY, DAMAGE to property and environment are not acceptable.
Either the risk is acceptable or not, you have to do something to reduce the risk as practicable as possible, this step is called CONTROL MEASURE or RISK MANAGEMENT.
The above is the simplest way I can explain on what is risk assessment and risk management.