Emergencies can happen to anyone, including your employees. Keeping your employees safe and getting them prepared to handle an emergency as best you can, is important for the wellbeing of everyone. Many times, when emergencies happen, very few people are prepared to handle them, but if Covid has taught us one thing, it is to always expect the unexpected and prepare before anything actually happens.

In relatively “safe” industries such as marketing, or office work, safety isn’t given much thought beyond what is required by regulations. However, in more dangerous industries such as healthcare, construction or manufacturing, safety is at the forefront of these industries, and ironically, they’re the ones who tend to have the highest rates of employee injury.

Emergencies can happen at anytime, anywhere, and a jobsite that has been safe for the past decade may suddenly be unsafe one day or may start to have an increase in the number of safety incidents occurring. Most employers know the basics of safety and how they should handle general emergencies such as fires and slips and trips, but little thought is given to natural disasters, pandemics, or health concerns such as strokes or heart attacks.

As 2020 taught us, the time is now to begin giving our safety plans a look over to make sure you’re doing what is legally required as an employer, but also taking in to account other facets of safety such as chain of command during an emergency, safety protocols of those who may have to stay behind to shut operations down, communicating an emergency to those who may speak little or no English, or seeing if your employees know how to use a fire extinguisher. These are some of the things that employers and businesses should consider when deliberating over their emergency plans and below are some tips.

 

1. Complete a risk assessment to determine the likelihood of different scenarios that could turn into emergency events in your work place.

2. Know the two steps of action. These are “life safety,” and “stabilization of the incident and minimization of the potential hazard.” Protective actions for life safety are those such as evacuation, sheltering-in-place, and lockdown. Incident stabilization measures are those such as administering medical treatment, rescue, containing a spill of hazardous chemicals, or handling a threat or act of violence.

3. Develop the emergency plan. This is a very broad piece of advice but some of the steps of developing an emergency action plan are: going through your risk assessment and identifying the chances of something happening, doing research on ways to prevent the risk of an emergency situation and implementing a plan specific to the risk, and training, retraining, or hosting regular drills for different types of emergency scenarios so that your employees are well informed.

 

• Consider a warning, notification or communication system to help alert your employees upon the incidence of an emergency. Depending on the size of the organization, this may or may not be cost effective. Also have a plan in place to communicate an emergency scenario to those who may speak little or no English.

• Delegate roles and responsibilities of each staff member during an emergency, as well as a backup employee for the role in the event the primary employee becomes incapacitated.

• Document vital information about your facility that includes where fire extinguishers, first aid kits, defibrillators, and safety data sheets may be found for easy and accessible reference, as well as parking areas, access roads, and location of controls for building utility and protection systems. Documentation of building systems is useful if a utility system fails and could help emergency personnel and staff know where emergency shut offs are located in the event shutting systems down is necessary for safety.

• Hold regular trainings and exercises such as drills for staff. An emergency plan is useless if no one has the knowledge or skills to implement it. Training your employees on alarm systems, communications, CPR/first aid/AED use, evacuation or shelter in place drills, and lockdown drills are a great way to practice the plan and keep everyone on the same page during an emergency event and should be included in your emergency response plans.

• Ensure employee contact information is up to date and put someone in charge of making calls if an emergency happens. Placing the names, phone numbers and location of emergency medical services, police departments or utility companies in an easy, accessible location in multiple areas of the office can be helpful and used as needed for reference.

 

A great resource for businesses to create an emergency plan that includes a checklist and template available for download and print, is located here and for more information and a more in-depth explanation of what you can do as an employer to protect your employees and your business, check out Industrial Safety and Hygiene News article here.

As always, stay safe!