Obviously, if you don't know about a hazard it will be pretty hard to keep it in mind. But most of us know that sailing right through an intersection when you're supposed to stop could easily cause severe injuries. Yet, out of around 20,000 people that were asked, over 90% said they had done just that. They either sailed right through a stop sign or a red light without seeing it, or saw it too late to do anything about it.
Some had close calls, some weren't so lucky. Maybe they were rushing. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they didn't see it because they were looking at a map or dialing a cellular phone. Maybe they didn't see it because they were thinking about something else (driving on auto-pilot) and the stop sign was partially hidden. The point is all of them knew they should stop, and all of them would have stopped if they had seen the stop sign in time.
There are 3 types of at-risk behavior:
- conscious behavior
- habitual behavior
- unintentional behavior
SAFESTART™ is about unintentional behavior and habitual behavior. It's about how to prevent mistakes or errors you never wanted to make in the first place. This five-module video/workbook course examines critical errors, while teaching techniques that reduce the risk of injury on-the-job, off-the-job and on-the-highway.
Procedures, engineering and ergonomics can minimize or even eliminate mistakes on the job, but off-the-job quite often you're on your own. Perhaps this is why there are twice as many off-the-job injuries as on-the-job injuries. This course is designed to help you efficiently minimize the mistakes or errors that can get you hurt, whether it's off-the-job, on-the-job or on-the-highway.
SAFESTART™ isn't about telling you what to do. It isn't designed to replace sound engineering or good management practices. It isn't intended to replace training on specific workplace hazards - its a new way to think about safety.
SAFESTART™ is about recognizing the patterns of behavior that cause injury. In a study of 10 years of injury/incident reports from over 100 companies, 80-85% of the injuries/incidents involved the same critical behaviors. SAFESTART™ has analyzed the states that lead people to make these critical errors - and using the Pareto Principle - has identified four states that contributed to almost all of the critical errors.
What differentiates SAFESTART™ from traditional behavior-based safety processes is linking these states to errors, and teaching people how to recognize these patterns so they don't make a critical error.