Can digitalization of Occupational Health & Safety Management System prevent accidents?

Accident Prevention is a proactive integral of a corporate social responsibility and business continuity management plan. Within the Occupational Health & Safety Management System, accident prevention strategies are further embedded in all the key element like e.g. Procurement Evaluation, Pre-Start Safety Reviews, Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment, Maintenance regimes, Health & Safety Training & Awareness, Legal and Other Compliance Evaluation, Heath & Safety Promotions, Emergency Preparedness Response Planning, Health & Safety Inspection, Health & Safety Meeting...etc. This involves policies, programs, plans, procedures, drills to support for workplace implementations. A documented system can be perfect but gaps during implementation process is at doubt. Therefore, digitalizing the Occupational Health & Safety Management System coupled with apps and technology devices can bridge gaps and reduce human errors.

 Human error / negligence contributes to a fair bit of workplace accidents. During the event from the material delivery to site, to work commencement and to handing over of the work areas, unsafe act and conditions occured but may not be captured. When the quantity of unsafe act, conditions cannot be quantify, it's difficult to generate a trend analysis. Nevertheless, there isn't any form of real-time monitoring of the sequence of events that happened before an occurence of incident.

A wearable camera with real-time monitoring and video recording function can capture the physical work area and it's surrounding where the supervisor travels around, which can be replay back to understand what was inadequate that contributes to an incident. Pre-start planning can involved Building Information Modelling (BIM) to identify hazards to support the Design For Safety (DFS) paradigm, where Manpower, Methodology, Materials, Measurement, Machine and Environment are considered in its inventory of DFS Risk register and assessment. This can facilitate smooth procurement of safety provisions on time, forecasting of upcoming mitigating measures to verify on. 

With all the data collected, the platform or technology program can be "smarter" through machine learning. Eventually, it'll emerge as an Artificial Intelligence system for the organization to be proud of. The benefits of adopting digitalization of the Occupational Health & Safety Management System are:

- Reduce workload of documentations, focus more on the physical work areas

-Reduce human error and negligence

- Immediate flag raising / prompting mechanism

- Auto reminder for timeline of regular maintenance

- Reduce workload on paperwork, focus more on physical workplace by the WSH Coordinators, Officers

- Standardize Occupational Health & Safety protocols across all

- Prevent arguments, conflicts, discriminations

- Close monitoring and data trends analysis

- Real-time monitoring, with essential information and records

- Ease of convenience with integration of sharepoint, server  

- Prevent overriding of work processes through shortcuts, omission of Occupational Health & Safety requirements

- Prevention of Employers being unaware of the issues

- Clear allocation of duties & responsibilities

- Increase transparence and clarity

- Backtrack / Retrieval of recordings for incident investigation purposes

- Objection recognition through smart CCTV, and sending danger environment reminders to supervisors immediately 

- Prior hazard identification and safety planning to mitigate them

- Facilitate in formulation of work activities and close monitoring of each and every changes

- Readiness for audit due to constant recordkeeping daily

Pitfalls that may have to be improve on:-

- An increasing variety of new ways of working, require time to adopt and buy-in

- Increase mental strain

- Overloaded by modern technology

- Inadequate data protection

Vehicle Safety

Quoting a drop from the ocean, to further share on what's a vehicle safety system and the combination of system may consist of 1. cameras (ultrasonic), 2. sensors /LADAR (LAser Detection and Distance Ranging) systems, 3. Viewing panel in driver cabin and 4. Centralized database to monitor data and generate trend analysis for users. Item 1 and 2 shall cover all the blind spots (yellow zones) of the driver. As for Fatigue management system, there are a few in the market currently e.g. Seeing machine. There may be a need to also include a Fatigue management device in the cabin too.

Workplace Safety and Health

Smart CCTV with real-time visual recognition features can help to immediately identify unsafe condition and report promptly. Such reminders are reported to key stakeholders and require immediate response to the identified area. Updates on rectification will then be send to the key stakeholders on closure. Quantity of such occurrence will be recorded, compiled and be generated to a weekly / monthly trend analysis dashboard.

Doing safety right the first time

Building a sustainable accident prevention system towards a safe work environment and being a market leader with good workplace safety & health performance stands out in the competitive market, while embracing technology is achievable. 

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