Safety Committee Meeting

Safety Committee Meeting

August 19, 2004

In attendance: Dave Jackson, John Anderson, Kristi Fitzpatrick, David Keeley, Bob Cozine, Scott Slee, Mike Valde, Andy Cooper, Frank Janaszak and Joe Brinson

Injury Report: Joe Brinson discussed the Safety Dashboard numbers (handout provided). Year to date there have been 58 OSHA reportable injuries compared to 67 for 2003 and 69 for 2002. It looks as though this number will surpass those numbers by year end. The Dashboard handout breaks the information down in several different ways to determine areas of concern. In general, our safety performance does not look good for this year. This suggests that we need to take another look at our programming efforts. For example, Wellness has implemented programs focusing on back injury prevention but back injuries have not gone down very much. We need to brainstorm some ideas to reinforce the point in the work environment. We need to modify work processes. E.g. Custodians should pull all chairs away from tables before they vacuum underneath instead of vacuuming and moving chairs at the same time.

Wellness: Tanya Villhauer is moving to Student Health Services and a search committee is being put together for her replacement. Dave J. met with Susan Klatt and Don Guckert and they both fully support continuing the work that Tanya started. Dave J. or a designee will serve on the search committee. Tanya will be participating in the health & wellness screenings. Joni Troester will be serving as the interim.

The stretching program has had great results with no injuries in our pilot areas. We are encouraging other areas to take on the program. Taking a few minutes at the beginning of each shift to stretch also creates an awareness of health and safety practices for the rest of that work shift.

Accident Investigation Form update: Diane Mathew Brown, AFSCME, International and Robin White, Local 12 Staff Representative, along with the sub-committee, assisted with revisions and a final form has been approved.

Go To Teams and the Go To Community: The Teams are going to be the strength of our new safety model in the field. The On the Level and Advance newsletters are a good communication tool but they can only go so far. The Teams will be able to serve as a point of contact for the shops and will be able to apply safe work practices to actual situations. The Safety Steering Committee will work on the roles of two-way communication between the committee and the Go To Teams. What are the criteria and the mechanism for communication (see handout). After the steering committee meeting, Dave Keeley presented a concept called the Go To Community. The Go To Community is both physical and virtual. The Facilities Management Intranet can be key to the front door of the virtual community, where a single page can take Go To members to communication links and job aids for conducting and communicating their business to others in the community. The virtual community would then link to the physical community. For example, injury and near-miss information is shared immediately within the Go To Community via email and incident investigation forms. Members of the Go To Teams in individual shops then physically share that information at the “Tailgate Meetings”, Turnover Meetings and morning workload huddles.

The idea is to look for solutions to on the job work situations. E.g. Are employees wearing rubber boots in wet work situations? Some of these solutions are outlined in the PPE. Has everyone read the PPE? We need to make sure that it is being read and signed off on by employees.

What is the next step with Diane Mathew Brown? The incident reporting form has already been updated. Diane is coming on September 8th & 9th for three work sessions for Utilities, O&M day shift and O&M night shift. Recruitment for the Go To Teams is underway and we should have 20 to 25 people in each session. We had a great response from Utilities with 30 volunteers. John De Brie is working on filling in some areas for O&M but we have a good base to learn and grow with. Campus Shops has 7 to 8 people. Some of the people on the Go To Teams are also on the Safety Steering Committee. It may be a good thing to have that thread of continuity but we should check with supervisors about employee’s time commitment to safety and make sure it isn’t causing a problem.

Diane plans to work on Risk Mapping during training. For example, she will look at the welding room at the Power Plant and participants will map out and code all the potential hazards in that area. We hope that the Go To Teams will take this information back to their areas and apply them. This seems like a huge undertaking but we need to make safety practices a part of the regular work routine. If these initial stages go smoothly, we’ll have more buy-in from staff.

The main purpose of the Go To training is to introduce roles of the team members, both the Go To and Safety Steering Committee, to introduce participants to the concept of safety “systems” and to train investigators the skills needed to conduct interviews and investigations of injuries and near-miss incidents.

We have total commitment from administration on our safety initiative (see Facilities Management Commitment handout). All directors and several managers attended the initial three-hour safety systems training presented by Diane Mathew Brown

Action Items: The Go To Teams will be replacing our At Large program. We do need to figure out a way to bring everyone together. Ideas? Biannual meetings, safety fair, etc.

What are our criteria to classify a work order as a safety request? It would not have otherwise been fixed other than for safety reasons. This will ultimately be at the discretion of managers. What is the process? Safety requests will be available to employees through the Safety Center bulletin boards, Facility Focus, managers, etc. In this model, they could fill out and electronic form and turn it in to supervisor to become a job and then a response is posted. A copy will go to Dave Jackson as the Safety Coordinator to track changes we have made for safety. We don’t want to burden staff with an excess of administrative forms, however, we will seek ways to measure and monitor our performance of our commitment to improving the safety environment in the physical workplace.

Note: Anyone with ideas to help build the Go To Community should contact Dave Keeley, Safety Steering Committee Chair or your supervisor. The Go To Community is an exciting concept that will soon become the method for efficiently conducting and communicating our business.

*Minutes prepared by Kristi Fitzpatrick