U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR ANNOUNCES $10.5 MILLION IN FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT WORKER SAFETY AND HEALTH
Credit: U.S. Department of Labor
Credit: U.S. Department of Labor
WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration will publish in tomorrow’s Federal Register three Susan Harwood Training Grants funding opportunity announcements for Targeted Topic Training Grants, Training and Educational Materials Development Grants, and Capacity Building Grants. A total of $10.5 million is available for nonprofit organizations including community and faith-based organizations, employer associations, labor unions, joint labor/management associations, Indian tribes, and colleges and universities.
The grant program supports the creation of in-person, hands-on training and educational programs including the development of materials for workers and employers in small businesses; industries with high injury, illness and fatality rates; and vulnerable workers, who are underserved, have limited English proficiency or are temporary workers. The grants will fund training and education for workers and employers to help them identify and prevent workplace safety and health hazards.
Targeted Topic Training grants support the development of quality training and educational programs that focus on identifying and preventing workplace hazards. The Targeted Topic Training grants require applicants to address the occupational safety and health hazards designated by OSHA in the grant announcement.
Training and Educational Materials Development grants support the development of quality classroom-ready training and educational materials that focus on identifying and preventing workplace hazards.
Capacity Building grants support organizations in developing new ability for conducting occupational safety and health training programs. An organization may apply for one of two Capacity Building grants: Capacity Building Pilot or Capacity Building Developmental grants. Capacity Building pilot grants assist organizations in assessing their training development needs as they formulate a capacity-building plan before moving forward with a full-scale safety and health education program. Capacity Building Developmental grants focus on developing new capacity of an organization to provide safety and health training and education. Capacity Building Developmental grant recipients will have the opportunity to continue building their new capacity with up to three additional 12-month follow-on grants, based on satisfactory performance.
Learn more about the funding announcement and register to apply at Grants.gov. Applicants must also register in the System for Award Management, and possess a “D-U-N-S” number. D-U-N-S is a unique, nine-digit identification number for each of a business’s physical locations. Businesses seeking federal government grants or contracts may obtain their D-U-N-S number free-of-charge from Dun & Bradstreet.
Harwood applications must be submitted online no later than 11:59 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Sept. 2, 2018.
Read more about the Susan Harwood Training Grant Program. The public may email questions about the program to the Susan Harwood Coordinator at harwoodgrants@dol.gov or call 847-759-7700, extension 7926.
Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers are responsible for providing safe and healthful workplaces for their employees. OSHA’s role is to help ensure these conditions for America’s working men and women by setting and enforcing standards, and providing training, education and assistance. For more information, visit https://www.osha.gov/.
Trending safety data, it can reduce incident rates by 90%
Through my time working in safety I am astonished that organizations still use excel as a means of managing and analyzing their safety data. Just the other week, I was speaking with a safety director of one of the largest general contracting firms in the U.S. and he was walking me through his weekly process of completing inspections for each job site. As he collect the information each day, he would gather his forms and then on Friday of each week he spends most of the day simply entering that data into a excel spreadsheet. I was blown away.
Not only was this a huge waste of time but even worse was that nothing really ever came from that data he was collecting. With all the affordable technology available today, there is no excuse for using these outdated and ineffective processes.
Many industries are taking advantage of “big data” by performing advanced analysis to generate predictions and forecasts. You may have heard the story about how Target was able to predict that a teen girl was pregnant before her parents knew. While many people see this as a invasion of privacy, this was still an incredible showing of the powerful of data analytics.
These same predictive analytics are now available for safety professionals to predict and prevent workplace injuries. By allowing organizations to gain deep insight into their business they are able to deploy resources in ways that have the greatest impact.
Predictive analytics make use of historical data to identify where potential incidents may occur. Imagine what you can learn by cross referencing data points like workers’ experience and time during a specific job, the last workplace inspection, geographic location, previous safety experience, if there is an injury prevention program or not.
Companies who are taking advantage of this technology are seeing real improvements. For example, a study done by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) showed that companies who took advantage of safety analytics were able to lower total incidents by as much as 95.3% after just one year. It also resulted in just 20 lagging indicator (incidents) data points to analyze while at the same time in 2010, it recorded 8,215 leading indicator (safety inspection) data points to analyze. That’s going from reactive to proactive.
You don’t need to be IBM to begin using predictive analytics. No matter the size of the company, collecting data and managing it in modern analytics software will bring huge benefits from time savings to actual incident reduction. I encourage you to take a look at what options are out there. Sospes’ has real-time incident tracking and dashboards. So for my friend at the General Contracting Firm, rather than spending Friday entering his data he spends that time following up and making improvements. Because a true safety program should be constantly improving not monitoring.