Following are some of the issues and observations made (data seems to be for USA):
- As per OSHA and Labour department, in the year 2019, more than 5000 persons died 9,00,000 were injured at workplace.
- Companies spend an average USD 7,500 for each lost-time workplace injury (we can call this as direct cost). Other costs consist of replacement of damaged equipment, reconstruction of facilities, compensation, etc. (As per theory, direct cost is only like a tip of the iceberg. And, cost of preventing an accident will be only about one fourth of the direct cost).
- As per National Safety Council, cost of workplace injuries in the year 2018 was USD 170 billion.
- Each fatality costs USD 1.0 million in medical costs, employer costs, and wage losses
- In a fatal fire and explosion incident, it seems, the emergency personnel do not have information of chemicals involved, otherwise, they could have saved the lives.
- Digitization and availability of data easily is not yet compulsory by many certification agencies. Organizations follow data retrieval in general age old methods like physical search instead of going for easy methods by using the computer/cloud technology/internet
- Data should be latest
Many of us definitely would have spent a lot of time in search of some information. It is my personal experience that on most of the occasions, I spent more than two hours to retrieve, and sometimes more than one person was engaged for information retrieval. And, on some occasions, I didn't find what I want. Availability of signed information will help us to support what remember/believe and use it to convince others for implementation of safety or whatever we would like to.
Digitizing the records with a provision to search will be helpful for us and our future generation. Some believe digitization means scanning the documents. But scanning without search option makes it useless. It is a primitive form. Instead of paper search, we have to search in computer page by page. Indexing these types of scanned pages may make life somewhat better. But, if scanning of documents is in readable text form to enable search with key words, and is available in encrypted form in cloud, like dropbox, mega, onedrive, pcloud, etc and is accessible with password protection to prevent unauthorized access, it will help a lot for productive use.
Searchable scanned records helped us greatly in the analysis of similar incidents and find suitable solutions to prevent recurrence of the incidents for a safe workplace
Updating of data is a continuous process.
Knowledge management is very important and critical to ensure safe productivity. World renowned safety professional Dr Trevor Kletz stated in one of his books (What Went Wrong) that incidents keep repeating either in the same or different similar organizations. We have to learn from them and implement measures to prevent recurrence.
Another safety professional Mr O.P.Kharbanda stated in a booklet about Bhopal accident, that Safety is not costly. In fact, it is free. What we need is the will to implement.
In one of the investigation reports, EPA made an observation which states, it is not the lack of knowledge that is responsible for the accident. It is the lack of use of the available information that is responsible for the accident.
How we can get the information at first place. If it is made available in a readily searchable form and is known the personnel how to use it, then this information management will help to achieve what we intended to.
Qualified technologies and personnel should be assigned for this and definitely organizations will reap the benefits from this.
