Health and Safety
Safety is the protection from the danger of an accident.
Physical health
This is a state where physical diseases do not exist within the employee. This is measurable.
Mental health – this is about the psychological well-being of an employee. Those related to the human mind and emotions rather than the human body.
Health and Safety Management refers to the activities involved in protecting and promoting the physical and mental health of the employees so that they can perform jobs efficiently and effectively.
Health and safety policies and programs are concerned with protecting employees against the hazards arising from their employment or their links with the company.
Occupational Medicine – This focuses on the treatment of work-related injuries and illnesses.
Occupational Hygiene – practice with measuring, identifying, and controlling environmental hazards.
Importance of Health and Safety in the Workplace
- It develop health and safety policies.
- Conduct assessments which help to identify hazards and risk related to them.
- To do Health and safety audit and inspection.
- To implement health and safety programs.
- Help to manage stress.
- It prevent accidents.
- To measure health and safety performance.
- Help to communicate the need for good health and safety practices.
- To train good health and safety practices.
- To organize health and safety.
Benefits of Health and safety
- Higher productivity
- Lower absenteeism
- Reduce the cost of accidents- Because it avoids accidents
- Meeting clients demands
- Improved employee moral and employee relations.
- Lower employee turnover.
- Improve public image.
Major types of hazards
1. Occupational Accident
A sudden event causes physical injuries to an employee or more employees working on the employment in an organization.
Types of occupational accident
1. Major accident
Major Accident
We can see four types. They are,
- Fatal accident – death of the employee with in the working period.
- Non fatal accident – because of the accident employee not death but he become disable.
- Permanent – As a result of the accident employee become disable for his life period.
- Temporary – partial disable. For some period.
- Total disable
2. Minor accident
Minor Accident
From this type of accident, employees got minor injuries. So they will recover within a shorter period.
Cost of occupational accident
- Direct
- Compensation given to the injured employee or family members in case of death.
- Medical expenses for recovering the injured.
- Expenditure repairing or replacing tool and equipment damaged due to the accident.
- Loss of production of the injured employee due to accident.
- Expenditure of training the new employees. Basically, they have to bare training cost.
- Cost of replacing a new employee on behalf of the disabled employee.
- Indirect cost
- Time spent by other employees to help the injured employee.
- Time, energy and money needed to record accident and consequences.
- cost of time, energy and money on investigations of accident.
- Stress and declined moral of other employees who have witnessed or are aware of the accident.
Ex: In the garment industry, they collect productivity by using seconds. If one employee got injured other employees came to see and help that employee. due to that reason, their productivity decreases.
2. Occupational Diseases
An illness that catches an employee due to the reason of performing their job role. Because of the job role, some diseases happen to the employee.
Ex: skin diseases, trauma (maximum level of stress)back pain, poisoning
Categories of cause of diseases
- Chemical causes – by inhaling dust of poison, toxic metals and etc. Also, it may enter the human body and may cause acute diseases.
- Biological causes – Bacteria, Viruses, and fungers may cause some brain fevers and allergies.
- Physical causes – As a result of heat, radiation, excessive noise, lack of proper ventilation may result some causes.
- Psychological causes – fear, shocks, frustration, monotony
3. Law quality of work-life
quality of work-life means the degree to which employee expectation is met by the job and the job environment.
Reasons for law quality of work life
- Poor job design
- Law employee involvement – employer not taking opinion form the employee. ( one way communication)
- In effective pay system
- Lack of job security
- Discriminating practices- gender, race
4. Organizational stress
This means pressures that employees feel in their work lives.
Stress may lead to the employee suffering from headaches, high blood pressure, unrest, etc.
Reasons
- Poor supervision
- Job dissatisfaction
- Poor team functioning
- Lack of privacy
- Role ambiguity (uncertainty)
