Zero Work-Related Injuries: “Never Event” Attitude Needed

“Safety is an attitude.  How’s yours?”  That tagline was one I created for one of my clients as a way to get the staff and management excited and bought into the new injury prevention system that I was assisting in design and implementation.  Attitude is vitally important to success whether it’s in regards to safety, sales, marketing or performance.  A company’s attitude towards employee health, wellness and safety will go a long way into attaining zero work-related injuries.

In a few blogs back I focused on “Never Events”.  Never Events is a term in healthcare that essentially means certain events just should not occur (i.e. wrong site surgeries, medication errors, etc.).   There is a certain attitude that has to become adopted and ingrained by those in healthcare in order to truly eliminate those errors.  The reason for the focus on eliminating event is because those errors have a high risk of significantly affecting the lives of patients.  At minimum those errors will cause inconvenience and discomfort to the patient.  At worst those errors can result in death.  The same can be said for safety accidents and injuries to employees.  Some injuries can be minor while others can be very serious with the worst case scenario resulting in death.

So the attitude towards worker errors and work-related injuries will greatly determine whether the company strives to continuously improve its systems and processes to prevent injuries or views those occurrences as just another cost of doing business.  A company who takes a laissez-faire attitude towards injury will not believe that zero injuries are possible, and for that matter even worthwhile trying to attain.  For those that strive to continuously improve in all aspects of the company, zero injuries is possible and attainable.

How’s your attitude towards injuries? Do attitudes matter?