March 19, 2008

Physical Facilities earns safety award

The 2008 Governor's Workplace Safety Awards recognized Performance Leadership, a partnership of Physical Facilities and Liberty Mutual Loss Prevention Services.

"Our overall safety culture has changed," says Kristi Evans, occupational safety professional in Purdue's Radiological and Environmental Management, which is part of Physical Facilities' Environmental Health and Public Safety section. "We've gone from compliance-driven to employee-guided risk reduction."

Evans has facilitated the program with John Roush, loss prevention consultant at Liberty Mutual, which is Purdue's worker's compensation carrier.

Performance Leadership goes back to 2003, but a focused effort to improve safety goes back almost a decade.

"Basically in 1999 we recognized that Physical Facilities had a huge injury rate of about 20 recordable injuries a year per 100 workers," Evans says. "That's a large, large number."

In partnering with the insurer, Purdue initially worked to improve accident investigation and the reporting of near misses and minor (first aid) injuries.

Performance Leadership shifted the initiative for further steps to the departmental safety committees among Physical Facilities' roughly 1,300 employees.

"Our injury rate in 2007 was down to 9.5, still above what we would like to see but less than half what it was," Evans says.

Also, she says, estimates are that in 2007 alone, savings in worker's compensation costs were $594,835.

One common task identified in a departmental safety committee and addressed was the lifting of 50-pound bags of salt over the shoulder to pour the salt into a brine tank. Strains and falls were too common during these types of activities.

Orders were switched to 40-pound bags, some tanks were repositioned, and platforms were added to reduce bending and reaching.

The utilities safety committee was concerned about crowbar prying of manhole covers weighing 150 pounds or more.  Reducing that weight was not practical, but a portable magnetic lifting device weighing 30 pounds was found.

The departmental safety committees in particular, and everyone else in Physical Facilities, deserve congratulations for the improvements and the award, Evans says.

Close to 130 physical facilities employees are involved in safety committees.

Evans and Roush have helped the committees apply a quantifiable ranking system to tasks. That helps establish priorities and assess effectiveness of steps to lessen risk.
The R3 scale is a trademarked system by Liberty Mutual. It puts three factors -- a task's frequency, likelihood to lead to injury, and likely severity of any injury -- on a scale of one to five.

"Purdue has been very accepting of this process and has worked very hard," Roush says.

He notes that R3 and Performance Leadership are processes, not programs that reach a particular goal or an end. The goal to improve safety is continuous.
Physical Facilities also can mark its progress in relation to the rest of the campus.

"In 2000, Physical Facilities was responsible for half of worker's compensation costs at the campus," Evans says. "In 2007, that was down to 26 percent."

The lesson is not lost on others. This month, Housing and Food Services and its safety committee have begun Performance Leadership in earnest. A pilot project in Tarkington Hall already has been completed.

Evans is serving as facilitator for the effort and John Myers, project manager for facilities in HFS, is safety program coordinator.

By May, Evans says, each HFS safety committee will have projects and initiatives outlined.