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Everyone has been hearing about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic these past few weeks in the media, at work, and almost everywhere public. Many organizations are taking important health and safety measures in the workplace to prevent any contact with the virus. Some daily workplace safety tips that employees have been encouraged to follow are:
- work from home.
- wash hands frequently.
- limit physical contact with others.
- use hand sanitizer after coming in contact with others.
With the potential for the coronavirus to spread and affect large numbers of people, RSC offers a way, through ARCHIBUS, to track and contain health and safety incidents. You and your organization can promote health and safety practices in the workplace by providing a forum through which to create and follow a safety improvement plan. This forum is ARCHIBUS’s Environmental and Risk Management domain, which contains the Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) module. This module is designed with the intent of promoting health and safety measures and practices in the workplace.
What is Environmental Health and Safety? Which features can help my organization?
The EH&S module provides facilities professionals with the ability to track workplace incidents, create work requests around incidents, alert employees to precautionary measures being practiced by their organization, and report to any regulatory organizations that need to be notified.
One of ARCHIBUS’s core strengths is that it is designed with inter-connectivity in mind. Inputting data in the initial “Report an Incident” feature within ARCHIBUS EH&S will lead the user to more detailed views and actions, like automatically filling out OSHA forms, generating a service request ticket, or updating the medical monitoring status for an employee. In this way, your organization can put an emphasis on workplace safety and safety management, keeping employees healthy and at ease.
Report an Incident
Show the importance of health and safety in the workplace, and report general details of a health or safety incident. Track the date, where it took place, and who was involved: this can include employees and non-employees, such as delivery people, visitors, animals, etc. Users can also identify the incident category. Categories can be as general or specific as your organization chooses; for this example, we used the “coronavirus” incident type, which is quite specific. Users can also provide an incident description, such as “showing signs of the coronavirus”, or “diagnosed with the coronavirus”.
The report form is simple and straight-forward and is intended to lead users into more detailed actions in the module, mostly under the “Track Incident” feature.
Track Incidents
The “Track Incident” feature uses the general information from the “Report an Incident” form to take the report to a greater level of detail through various views. It also allows users to take important action within their organization’s workplace safety management plan. Some particularly useful actions are:
- viewing incident details initially entered in the report.
- redlining the location of the incident.
- generating a service request.
- entering any medical responses to the incident.
- filling out and attaching documents associated with the incident, such as OSHA forms.
This is an especially useful feature for managers who will be overseeing incident responses, preventive measures, and aftermath procedures.
Incident Details
This displays the initial details of the incident from the incident report.
Site Information
See where the incident took place, and, if necessary, indicate the location with a redline on your organization’s drawings so others, such as craftspeople, janitorial staff, managers, and employees, can view its location. Users may submit the redlined drawing as an incident document so it appears with other attached documents. Follow environmental health and safety guidelines by maintaining clean facilities that are up to standards.
Medical Information
Enter and track any medical information, such as whether anyone was admitted to the emergency room or hospital, which facility they went to, who their attending physician was, and any medical results, such as full recovery, still recovering, or death. Further medical monitoring is possible under “Incident Response”.
Incident Response
Located under “Track Incidents”, “Incident Response” is an essential step in the incident reporting process. From this view, several important actions can be taken, such as generating a service request ticket, additional medical monitoring, and assigning work restrictions. This is arguably one of the most important features in ARCHIBUS Environmental Health and Safety.
Maintenance Requests and Tickets
An essential step in any hazard management program is maintaining clean and regulated facilities. From the incident response view, users can generate a service or maintenance request ticket that automatically associates itself with the location and incident category/type entered in the incident report.
Medical Monitoring
Additional medical monitoring in EH&S can promote safety awareness and lets users input and track how long someone will be monitored, assigns a tracking number, and update the status of the individual or any test results that may be pending.
Work Restrictions
Assign special work restrictions to individuals, such as “working from home” in the case of the coronavirus. Set a time period for the restriction, track how many workdays were lost, and determine whether the restriction is temporary or permanent. Help everyone how to improve safety awareness in the workplace.
Employee Training
Assign a training program to an employee or employees to strengthen your organization’s workplace safety program. In the case of the coronavirus, users may wish to assign an employee a hand-washing class, a hygienic-practices-while-sick class, or provide a program to teach people best practices to prevent to sickness. Record when the training was completed. Help employees learn how to create a safe and healthy workplace.
Metrics
Create metrics that will appear on your Environmental Health and Safety dashboard around any statistics or data your organization desires to track. Show, with real data, the importance of health and safety in the workplace. This could be days of work lost, employees who are working from home, how many cases of the coronavirus have occurred within the organization, and much more. Help decision makers learn how to improve health and safety performance by creating alerts that will send out emails or notifications to key people or the entire organization. Metrics and alerts are completely customizable to each organization.
Incidents Map
View a global portfolio on an interactive map of where and how many times incidents of the same type have occurred.
Incidents Log and Pre-formatted OSHA Reports
Under the Incidents Log, users can leverage the data already entered for an incident to automatically fill in an OSHA report form, utilizing the role of the government in industrial safety.
RSC has seen great success from our clients using this module, and we hope that your organization, too, can discover how to improve health and safety in the workplace by leveraging the powerful features in the ARCHIBUS Environmental Health & Safety module. If you have more questions, we are available to demo the software. Contact us to find out more about the EH&S module, find ideas to promote safety in the workplace, and bring your organization’s work environment to full health!