June Is National Safety Month
National Safety Month is celebrated annually. Organizations use the opportunity to get the word out about the leading causes of home, work, and community related injuries to try and encourage people to live a safer, and longer life.
National Safety Month
Safety is a broad term – almost too broad.
Typically, when someone says “be safe”, it’s used in a context that you can recognize what they mean. For example, if you’re heading out on the road and someone tells you to “be safe”, then you know that they mean to be safe driving. If you’re headed into work on a dangerous job and someone says to “be safe”, then you know that they mean to use care on the job. As the years pass, technology advances, and trends change, so do the dangers that can potentially affect us in our day to day lives.
Many of us worry about the things that we see in news stories or on social media.
We see car accidents, train accidents and things of this nature. While these things are indeed risks, we are all mostly preconditioned to buckle up, know that emergency exists with cars and trains, etc. and we know how to react in most crisis situations.
However, we’re more at risk for the things that we experience day-to-day.
- Have you ever thought about how many times you’re put into a situation in any given day that could be dangerous?
- From the moment you wake up you could trip on something in your room and injure your head.
- You could inflict burns on your body from a hot pot of coffee.
- You could injure yourself on a piece of machinery that you’ve used thousands of times at work.
- Are you using your cellphone and driving?
- Things that you weren’t thinking about could certainly happen and you weren’t focusing on how to prevent the accidents.
That’s what National Safety Month is about. Making people aware of what the potential risks are and how to prevent them. You need to be mindful of the risks around you and actually ‘think’ about the dangers and how to react just-in-case something were to happen. For a moment – turn off your auto-pilot and be aware.
The National Safety Council makes a number of resources available for employers, families, and individuals so that they can be fully informed about the potential risks that they encounter and how to live safely. They also encourage businesses and employers to pass the information down to their employees.
Just educating yourself is a huge step. However, the real differences happen when you pass that information on to others. By telling just one other person, you can lessen the chances that they will be injured in a way that could have been prevented. I hope this blog does that for you today.
While seminars and big office meetings are surely helpful, it doesn’t have to be a major discussion. Sitting down with your employees one-on-one and letting them know their risks and that you care about their well being as a whole will then inspire them to have conversations with their co-workers. Talk to your family members and friends about safety issues such as, DON’T drive and text.
Change and inspiration gets passed down from person to person, and that’s exactly what the National Safety Council is aiming to achieve.
References:
1. http://www.nsc.org/pages/home.aspx
2. http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/journey-guides.aspx
3. Warning Graphic Driving and Texting Video: http://www.businessinsider.com/brand-new-bone-chilling-dont-text-and-drive-ad-will-leave-you-with-goosebumps-2014-4
