How Connectivity is Leading the Future of PPE and Creating Adaptable, Proactive Safety Programs
Advanced technologies are making it possible for safety managers to better connect workers, worksites and workflows for safer, more efficient work environments.
- By Chris Borneo
- Mar 01, 2022
Want to know what makes one safety program more proactive than another? It’s simple: Having access to meaningful data-- which data is collected, how it’s collected, how it’s disseminated, who analyzes it and when can determine how proactive your safety program is. That’s because every single data point has the power to inform decisions that can literally change your workplace safety and, perhaps, save a life.
What Is Meaningful Data?
Meaningful data is information that is relevant to a given situation. It’s information that helps in identifying risks, as well as mitigating them. More importantly, it’s information that promotes employee well-being and worker safety.
Organizations that understand the importance of it know that meaningful data is:
- Accessible: readily retrieved and easily visualized by those who need it
- Accurate: reliable in informing and supporting decision making
- Automatic: routinely identified and collected, which simplifies recordkeeping and reduces the potential for human error
- Applicable: goes beyond the factual and is specific to the user or situation
- Actionable: enables insight and clarity for swift and proactive decision making
Where Does Meaningful Data Come From?
If you think about it, critical data points come from – and have an impact on – three primary sources: (1) workers, (2) worksites and (3) workflows.
Data points for workers include such things as PPE compliance, productivity and incidents. Worksite data points provide information about the jobsite, including location, working conditions and potential hazards. Workflow data points include PPE readiness, device assignment and management and reporting and recordkeeping.
In the world of safer gas detection, these data points, if they’re meaningful, will translate answers to such fundamental questions as these:
- At the start of the workday, is the PPE ready to use?
- At the end of the workday, did the worker use the assigned device for the entire shift?
- Throughout the workday, what, if anything, happened that needs to be explored, investigated, mitigated or resolved?
Traditional PPE offers limited awareness and little in the way of answers to those questions. Also, traditional PPE is fraught with the potential for human error, often making even the most basic compliance a challenge.
This article originally appeared in the March 1, 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.