SHO course in MIRI

I just back from MIRI last nite after giving lectures on Occupational Health Module for SHO course organised by NIOSH Sarawak. About 14 participants attended the course, all of them are very enthusiastic about OSH. I wish them success in their involvement in OSH field. Welcome to OSH world.

Is this Safe?

This photo was taken by one of SHO course participant. The photo clearly shows us about safety practice. The question we should ask as a safety practitioner is: Is this good standard operation procedure? To me this is both unsafe condition and unsafe act. When both factors occur simultaneously, the risk of accident is high. 

SHO Course Teaching at NIOSH KUCHING

Today I involved in teaching session at NIOSH Kuching: - Ergonomics , Occupational & Psychosocial Stress, Shiftwork and Mental workload. This is part of Occupational Health module for  SHO course. About 14 participants enrolled in this part time modular course.

First photo above showed the slide title of one of the lectures and second photo showed some of the participants during the break time.

Industrial Accident

The above photo showed cut wound at the first web of left hand of one worker who was accidentally hit by a broken glass at work.

Safety & Health Committee (SHC) meeting

On 28 June recently, we have our 9th Safety & Health Committee (SHC). A lot of issues was brought up by the members including exposure to radiation in operation theatre. Our next meeting will be in September, 2007.

Food Safety

I took these two photos from a local restaurant classified as Class A and  from one hawker at weekend market.

What do you think about the food safety in these two scenes?

I will be presenting on "Medical Fitness requirements for Food handlers"  at the seminar on 'Food Safety,Handling & Solid Waste Management' organised by NIOSH Sarawak as follows:

Date: 18 - 19 July 2007

Venue: Holiday Inn, Kuching

My blog is already one year old

I started this blog on 11 June last year (2006). The purpose of this blog is to educate the workforce about the important of their health and safety as the valuable asset beside knowledge. The mission of this blog is helping the workforce to become healthy and productive workforce. My mantra is to promote and protect health at workplace.
I hope this webblog will help the workforce to become valuable human capital or "modal insan" to the nation.
I will try to give more informations on OSH and updating the visitors on the local news on OSH.

Is Safety priceless ?

Last Thursday, 7 April 2007, I handled one emergency case at our A&E unit. This case is a 36 year old chinese man, involved in group fight. He was slashed on the face using sharp object (?parang ? samurai) resulting in splitted of his face into 2 and broken of the back of his right skull. CT scan showed the optic nerve of his right eye was totally torn. He came to our hospital drove by his friend who was also involved in the fight but sustained only slashed wound at the lower middle of the back. He managed to walk to our A&E.
Are the life and safety priceless nowadays?

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.

HAPPY WORLD DAY FOR SAFETY AND HEALTH AT WORK - 28 April 2007

International Labour Organisation (ILO) declared 28th April, 2007 is the World Day for Safety and Health at Work with this year theme :Safe and Healthy Workplaces - Making Decent Work a Reality
Workers is the primary tool for all business. Without workers, any business will collapse. Let us take care of our workers by promoting and protecting their health and safety at workplace.
Happy OSH day to all.

Step 1: Identify the hazard

Photo 1:

Photo 2:




Can you identify what is the HAZARD in the above two photos?
Identification the hazard is the first step in Risk Assessment.

RISK ASSESSMENT IS MEASURING THE EXPOSURE TO HAZARD

All workplaces have health and safety hazard, the only difference is the type of the hazard. Although hazard can brings harm but without exposure to the hazard, the harm is not significance. So, how much exposure do you have to the hazard, is the main question in managing safety and health at workplace.
The steps taken to measure this exposure to the hazard is called risk assessment in OSH terminology. So risk assessment is a proactive steps to identify the hazard and its exposure to the workers.
The questions ask in health and safety risk assessment are :
1. What is the hazard?
2. Who are exposed to the hazard?
3. How much is the exposure?
4. What is the consequence if hazard released its harm during this expsoure?
5. Is the risk significant?
6. Are the control measures adequate to prevent the conseqeunces of the hazard?
I will give the anwer to the above questions in my next posting... stay tune

DOSH's Seminar on Occupational Health services

Yesterday (5th April), I attended one day seminar on occupational health services (OHS) organised by DOSH Sarawak. The seminar was attended by 250 participants, majority are OH practitioners. 5 papers were presented by OH experts. Dr Abu Hasan Samad, one of the OH expert and sifu in Malaysia, presented a paper on the effective way to implement OHS. He explained in detail on the scopes of OHS. 2nd speaker, Tuan Hj Anuar Mokhtar a well-known Industrial Hygienist from DOSH, presented a paper on the scope of duty of Industrial Hygienist. Dr Faridah Mohd Amin, Deputy Director (Occupational Health Section) of DOSH Putra Jaya presented in brief the new DOSH guideline (2005) on OHS.
Two speakers Ms Tham from BASF-PETRONAS and Mr Nawawi from one of PETRONAS subsidiary company in Kuantan, Pahang shared their experinces in implementation of OHS in their plant.
Hopefully this seminar will help OH practitioner to understand more on the OHS and the strategies to implement OHS at their organisation.
One person approached me asking about the "out source way" to provide OHS and I promised to propose to his organisation on this.

My Activities in the first 2 weeks of March 2007

On the 5th of March, I gave lectures on Basic Ergonomics and Ergonomics risk factors, Shift work, Mental workload and occvupational Stress to the participants of Full Time SHO Course in Bintulu. I departed to Bintulu on Sunday 4th March at 3;30 pm and back to Kuching on 5th March at 5:30 pm.
On the 12th March 2007, I and another 3 of Kuching Specialist hospital's staff (including our GM) joined YB Datin Hjh Fatimah Abdullah and State legislative Speaker DS Awang Asfia in the Sejahtera Task Force II at Kg Penibong of Pulau Bruit Daro. Kg Penibong is located about 2 hours using Speedboat equipped with 400 horse power engine from Sibu Town.
Along two hours journey some of us sat in awkward postion (non-ergonomics) which caused back pain.

After 2 month breaks....

After almost 3 months, today I finally completed my training session with PPKS students. I am involved in teaching Certificate in Safety Inspector Program, SHO certificate Program and Certificate in Halal Executive Program.
All these 3 programs are for unemployed graduate, just imagine how lucky they are; fully sponsored by government with pocket money. I taught them Occupational health and Ergonomics module. For Halal Executive sertificate, I was given a task to lecture them on Perubatan Halal BUT I prefer the term Perubatan Islam.
I will continue posting in my blog from now onward. Stay tuned.

Selamat Menyambut Eidul Adha dan Tahun Baru Mashihi 2007

Saya ingin mengucapkan selamat menyambut hari raya eidul adha kepada semua pengunjung laman blog saya. Semuga semangat pengorbanan dari pengajaran sejarah Nabi Ibrahim a.s dan Nabi Ismail a.s. akan membantu kita dalam perjuangan dalam bidang kesihatan dan keselamatan pekerjaan.
Juga semuga kedatangan tahun baru mesehi 2007 akan memebri semangat melangit dalam diri kita untuk meneruskan perjuagan tersebut.
Salam hormat dari,
Dr. Aini Bin Hj. Murni, DP(USM) DSKP(UKM)
•Memetik kata-kata Persius dalam bahasa Latin:Sicre tuum nihil est nise te sicre hoc sciat alter: yang boleh diterjemah sebagai :"Ilmu pengetahuan anda tidak bermakna jika tidak ada orang yang mengetahuinya"
http://cendekiaohs.blogspot.com